This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more. In the post–World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women’s studies, (...) and American studies. In _We Demand,_ Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the ’60s and ’70s—it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States. (shrink)

This article uses the circumstances of black intimacies within the nineteenth century to analyze the ways in which the law, by definition, limits human possibility and agency. This limiting of possibility and agency is then visited upon LGBT people in the moment of marriage equality. The article attempts to show how that limiting is, in fact, part of the definition of legal personhood. While expanding forms of agency prescribed by the state, the law has also worked to narrow the forms (...) of social agency produced and enacted by minoritized communities. This article, in sum, takes the marriage right as an example of a legal agency that confers personhood and narrows the intimate universes and social capacities produced by racial and sexual minorities. (shrink)