This chapter examines Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998), written by famed Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs, and considers this text’s status within the field of Asian American literary studies. As an autobiography that details Boggs’s activist history, including the history of state neglect in her home base of Detroit, and as a text that decenters Boggs’s experience as a Chinese American woman, Living for Change opens uncommon ground for Asian American literary inquiry. Rather than opening up questions around racial authenticity, the governing framework for Asian American autobiographical criticism, Boggs’s autobiography instead demonstrates how ethnic American autobiography might respond to the death-dealing force of urban infrastructural abandonment. It thus showcases the pliability of a generic category that has often proved vexing for scholars of Asian American studies. Taking its cues from Boggs’s text, which prioritizes her relationship to place over and above her Chinese American identity, this chapter furthers a framework of place-consciousness, proposed by scholar Karin Aguilar San-Juan, that considers forms of belonging both alongside and in excess of race and ethnicity. In so doing, it demonstrates how Living for Change expands dominant understandings of ethnic American autobiography’s cultural and political imperatives.

The complex mix of transgression and conservativism in the sexual politics of Decadence is well explored through the Decadent turn back to the ancient world. Looking back to antiquity at the end of the nineteenth century was an complex aesthetic performance, reflecting both genuflection to traditional cultural authority and transgression of modern political frameworks. The Decadent imagination was interested in the aesthetics of collecting. Decadent writers became fascinated by androgynous and hermaphroditic bodily forms, which they viewed as a symbol of decadent collecting culture – an assemblage of pleasurable, sensuous experiences. But the ambiguously gendered body of ancient art, so venerated by Decadent writers, revealed the ambivalences of their gender politics.

This chapter discusses the comparisons made in cases where there is a conflict of equality rights by reference to four cases in the Supreme Court, Bull v Hall and Preddy, the Jewish Free School case, the Gay Cake Case and the Paulley the wheel cahris on buses case. It considers what is the best way to resolve those conflcits and where and how the comparison of the rights should be made.