University at Buffalo Funding Projects on ‘Queer Theory’ and ‘Racial Capitalism’

University at Buffalo Funding Projects on ‘Queer Theory’ and ‘Racial Capitalism’

A total waste of money. It’s just more progressive politics pretending to be academic work.

Campus Reform reports:

University at Buffalo funds research on ‘queer theory,’ ‘racial capitalism’

The University at Buffalo’s Gender Institute will fund grant projects with up to $7,000 to advance “scholarship related to women, gender, and sexuality.”

Funding, which ranges from $1,000 to $7,000, can support “data collection, archival research, fieldwork, research assistance, supplies, books, software, travel integral to the development of the project, and other forms of research support and curriculum development expenses.”

Previous funding cycles included projects focused on abortion, “queer theory,” and “racial capitalism.”

A grant from fall 2025 supported a monograph about Shakespeare’s Macbeth and abortion. The project was titled “Queering Birth, Queering Death: The Problem of Life in Early Modern Literature.”

A description states: “The book plumbs the queer, unnatural, and uncanny dimensions of reproduction and death in early modern literature and media artifacts, using the curious phenomenon of characterization to confront, in our own time, the questions of ‘who counts as human?’ and ‘whose life matters?’”

Christine Varnado, an associate professor in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and English, received the grant for the project.

Varnado is the author of “The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature.” She has also written articles on “The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Bagdad and The Merchant of Venice” and “Queer nature, or the weather in Macbeth.”

Another project from last fall, “Gendered Labor and Racialized Capital in Contemporary Rap Music,” argued that “capitalism consumes Blackness in gendered ways.”

The project reached this conclusion by examining the work of Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Nas X, Tyler the Creator, and Kendrick Lamar.

“I position these patterns as technologies of racial capitalism that operate despite claims of colorblindness and highlight the ways that these artists use technical communication to provide strategies for survival as a Black person in the United States,” the description states.

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