Can being versed in gender and sexuality theory help you be a more effective Navy sailor? The U.S. Naval Academy appears to think it can, and is looking to hire a specialist in Gender And Sexuality Studies to join its faculty for a tenure-track position.
The professor will teach a course that brings Naval cadets up to date on the topics “through a set of focused readings of theories, histories, perspectives, and/or major figures in LGBTQ, women’s and/or gender studies,” according to the course description on the Naval Academy’s website.
According to the description, readings for the elective course may include the authors Audre Lorde, Sarah Ahmed, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Gloria Anzaldua, who describes herself as a “Chicana dyke-feminist.” If these authors are a smattering of the Naval Academy’s curriculum for this course, the country’s next generation of sailors is in for a solid dose of woke academic theories.
Sarah Ahmed, a contemporary British-born feminist professor of Pakistani and English descent, focuses on the intersection between sexuality, race, and feminism. She is the author of “The Feminist Killjoy Handbook,” which argues that “killing joy can be a radical world-making project.”
“Do you refuse to laugh at offensive jokes? Have you ever been accused of ruining dinner by pointing out your companion’s sexist comment? Are you often told to stop being so ‘woke’? If so, you might be a feminist killjoy — and this handbook is for you,” reads the book’s description.
Gloria Anzaldua, who, like Ahmed, was a lesbian, describes herself as a “Chicana dyke-feminist” as well as a “poet, writer, and cultural theorist.” She writes about her experience as a “Chicana” — a term used by some Mexican Americans to describe their Native Mexican ancestry — intersects with gender, race, and colonialism.
Although Anzaldua primarily identifies as a lesbian, she admitted to having sexual fantasies involving a father and daughter, a sister and brother, and even a woman and a dog, wolf, jaguar, tiger, and panther.
Audre Lorde, yet another lesbian, described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She was a professor and progressive activist who was influential in the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements during the ’70s and ’80s.
One of her poetry collections, “The Black Unicorn,” draws on African mythologies as the basis for exploring questions about gender, sexuality, racial identity, pride, and motherhood, according to the college.
Lorde and two other women writers founded an activist publishing company called Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to promoting black feminist authors.
The last author on the Naval Academy’s Gender and Sexuality course list is Kimberle Crenshaw, a Critical Race Theory scholar and lawyer who teaches at both Columbia Law School and UCLA and is credited with coining the term “intersectionality,” which is widely used by progressives today to refer to a method of analyzing privilege and discrimination.
Crenshaw, who is black, was also part of the legal team representing Anita Hill at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ Senate confirmation hearings in the 1990s. Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment.
She first used the term in her essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”
In 2020, she insisted that intersectionality is not “identity politics on steroids” or ” a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs.”
“It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other,” she told Time Magazine. “We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status.”
The Biden administration has promoted woke themes across the federal government for years.
Earlier this year, President Biden doubled down, signing yet another executive order requiring the federal government to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Over the last few years, that guidance has permeated the whole of government, including the military.
Earlier this summer, the administration pumped the brakes on drag shows at U.S. military bases after criticism from Republicans. Last year, the Navy hired an active-duty sailor and drag queen to be the face of the Navy’s campaign to fight plummeting recruitment. In 2021, the Army debuted ads showing a cartoon lesbian wedding, just days after the CIA caught flack for a similarly woke recruitment ad campaign.
The Naval Academy defended the course in an emailed statement, saying the Academy “focuses on respect and inclusion of people of all backgrounds in order to develop well-rounded future leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps.”
“A vast array of intellectual ideas, approaches and theories are mentioned during classroom discussions,” the Academy told The Daily Wire. “The Naval Academy educates midshipmen to be critical thinkers who can analyze issues from multiple perspectives and contexts; our focus is on how to think, not what to think.”
Besides the Gender And Sexuality course, the Naval Academy’s English Department also offers a course on Latinx Studies, in which students will learn about “identity formation through many of its facets, including: class, race, gender, sexuality, and language.”
And of course, since the Navy pays 100% of cadets’ tuition, room, and board, you the taxpayer get to foot the bill for all of it.