Paris Shih is a Taiwanese writer and cultural critic based in New York. He is the author of The Power of the Badgirl: The Rise of Postfeminism in Popular Cinema (2015), The Girl Revolution: 100 Years of Girl Culture from Flappers to Girl Power (2016), and Sex, Heels, and Virginia Woolf: A History of Feminist Polemics (2018). His writings have appeared and are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Morgan Library & Museum, Tropics of Meta, Taiwan Insight, and the collection Queering Taiwan Studies, among others.
His research explores forms of queerness across historical periods, with a focus on the history of racial queerness. His current research project, The Other Sodomites, uses sodomy as a guiding concept to trace the history of racial queerness from the medieval to modern periods. Rather than examining the intersection between race and sexuality as if these categories developed concurrently, it looks at sodomy as a central site of racial figurations and proposes an alternative history of race and racialization.
Besides queer historiography, he is known for his writings on popular culture, especially those on the diva. He has published widely on divas across cultural and geographical boundaries, and is often credited as the first critic to theorize the queer potential of Mandopop divas Jolin Tsai and S.H.E. He is working on a cultural memoir, Divatopia, in which he traces the history of Mandopop and its queer significance through personal narrative. He is also working on an essay collection, Feeling Millennial, where he explores the structural relationship between millennials and post-90s popular culture through a transcultural and transnational perspective.
A Ph.D. candidate in English at the City University of New York, he is the recipient of the Morgan Library & Museum Research Fellowship, the CUNY Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship, and the Writing across the Curriculum Fellowship at Queens College. His books have been named Book of the Month and Editor’s Choice by Marie Claire Taiwan, Taaze, Bios Monthly, and selected for the Aesop Queer Library. He teaches at Queens College and lives in New York City.
Email: sshih1@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Paris Shih 