Qing Shen

Qing Shen earned his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Uppsala University in December 2024. He was previously a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender at the University of Brighton. His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and media culture in contemporary China and East Asia. He is currently working on a writing project, building on his doctoral dissertation, which explores the lives of older queer men in Shanghai. His broader research interests also include a range of queer-related topics, such as HIV representation in Korean gay drama, East Asian queer cinema, Chinese crime thrillers, and the destitute heterosexual man.

His work has appeared in journals including Continuum, Social Analysis, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Made in China Journal, and he has forthcoming work in Ethnos, LGBTQ+Family, and China Perspectives. Prior to his academic career, Shen worked as a journalist for five years in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, contributing to major Chinese media outlets.

Qing Shen’s project contributes to the ICI Focus AutoReduction through its linkage to the emic concept of ‘play’ among ageing, working-class Chinese queer men in Shanghai—subjects shaped by socialism, postsocialist restructuring, and decades of sexual stigmatization. By attending to how the men invoke ‘just play’ or ‘just for fun’ to engage in deliberate forms of self-reduction such as withdrawing from the language of identity politics, scaling down intimate aspirations and sociality, and refusing to be archived, Shen approaches play as a ludic form of autoreduction.

Play operates both as what José Esteban Muñoz (2009) calls ‘queer worldmaking’, the cultural and performative practices through which queer subjects imagine and enact alternative worlds beyond dominant norms, and as a form of world-unmaking that is far from utopian. By tracing how queer life unfolds through autoreduction under conditions of political repression, economic precarity, and embodied ageing, the project aims to critically reconsider the Muñozian-inspired emphasis on world-making and the utopian imperative to produce new worlds in queer theory.