Books in the American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present series

In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. This book explores the recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a non-gendered, gender optional, or gender-hacked future.

In the wake of the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. This book offers an overview of Black Lives Matter and explores the possible future of the movement.

';Puts campus activism in a radical historic context.'New York Review of Books In the postWorld 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. InWe 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 '70sit is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.

Ayn Rand's complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. Mean Girlfollows Rand's trail through the twentieth century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes. Outlining the impact of Rand's philosophy of selfishness, Mean Girlilluminates the Randian shape of our neoliberal, contemporary culture of greed and the dilemmas we face in our political present.