Another lick to the taxpayers.
Via Free Beacon:
The National Endowment for the Humanities released its latest round of projects, which includes studies of the “history of French lesbian activism,” and $20,000 for a new college course on “questions about neighborliness.”
The projects are part of $21.1 million in grants announced this week for the federal agency’s “Common Good” initiative.
Tamara Chaplin, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received a $6,000 summer stipend for her project “Postwar French Media, and the Struggle for Gay Rights.”
The project is described as a “book-length study of the history of French lesbian activism since World War II.”
Chaplin’s areas of study include contemporary France, the histories of gender and sexuality, feminist and critical theory, and queer studies. She previously contributed to the 2011 book Orgasm without Limits: May ’68 and the History of Sex Education in Modern France.
Chaplin also previously wrote a journal article on “Cyberqueer History and Lesbian Identity,” that explored how lesbians came out on the Minitel, a pre-Internet online service in France.
Chaplin described the online service as a “utopian” idea that allowed lesbians to come out online.
“The Minitel made possible new forms of lesbian identity untethered to specific locations, organizations, embodiment, or proximity,” Chaplin wrote. “It also made possible unique ways of being ‘out of the closet’ in a virtual space that was at once private (experienced in the intimacy of home or office) and public (accessible to others and premised on representation and communication).”