Books

In his debut study, The Power of the Badgirl, Paris Shih traces a history of postfeminist cinema from Sex and the City to Legally Blonde, from Mean Girls to Sorority Row. Spanning three decades and traversing different genres, the book simultaneously builds on and revises previous scholarship on postfeminism. While feminist scholars such as Angela McRobbie critique the limits of the cultural phenomenon, Shih argues for its queer possibility, observing the intertwined developments of postfeminist and queer subjectivities at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the first book ever published on postfeminism in the Sinophone world, The Power of the Badgirl remaps feminist cinematic history and lays the foundation for what would become his trilogy of alternative feminist historiography.

In his follow-up book, The Girl Revolution, Paris Shih uses the concepts of girlhood and generational differences to chart a “prehistory of postfeminism.” As he observes, the history of the cultural phenomenon could be traced to the 20s, when the flapper redefined the idea of girlhood and launched the “girl revolution.” Following the flapper, Helen Gurley Brown created another wave of cultural movement with her runaway bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, reinventing feminine ideals through alternative lifestyles other than marriage and the family. In the 90s, Riot Grrrls, Spice Girls, and daughters of second-wave feminists started the revolution’s third wave through a process of generational disidentification. Rather than undermining feminist politics, Shih contends, the “girl revolution” formed a dialectical relationship with the three waves of feminist movement, at once remapping the history of feminism and anticipating the future of postfeminism.

In his third book, Sex, Heels, and Virginia Woolf, Paris Shih revisits seminal debates among feminists and explores the intersection between feminist and queer historiographies. Tracing feminist polemics surrounding major literary figures such as Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, as well as controversial topics including sex, fashion, and the romance novel, Shih discovers the uneven yet intertwined developments of feminist and queer theorization since the 60s. Through such a critical review, Shih not only develops an alternative feminist historiography but also foregrounds its queer potential. As he argues, the ideological contradictions in feminist thinking led to the birth of queer theory. The “troubles” of feminist history, thus, illuminated rather than obscured queer futures.