Pixie Shen (They/Them) is currently a 5th-year PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Notre Dame, with minors in Gender Studies and Film Studies. Prior to joining ND, they completed an Honours Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 2020 at the University of Toronto.
I work in historically-informed contemporary metaphysics, especially questions of being, grounding, and the self, which spans the entire history of metaphysics and beyond the continental-analytic divide. Besides traditional metaphysics, I work in contemporary social metaphysics, where I think about the possibility of “queer metaphysics” as an ethics of witnessing. Besides metaphysics, I work in queer of color critique and critical disability studies, by examining how the embodied experience and negative affects of asian queer and autistic subjects from the Global South, such as myself, challenge dominant theories of the subject. My current research is fragmented into two interconnected projects on the fragmentation of the world and the self, respectively:
Fragmentation of the World is an analytic metaphysics project, co-directed by Sara Bernstein and Kris McDaniel, on how the world is fragmented and how our metaphysical theories should, accordingly, be pluralistic. My dissertation develops a realist and pluralist metametaphysics—fragmentalism, drawing on Spinoza’s Parallelism and María Lugones’s Latinx World-Traveling. While the main focus of my dissertation is metaphysics, it also intersects with epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics. I argue that fragmentalism provides a metametaphysical foundation for social metaphysics, grounding queer metaphysics as an ethics of witnessing.
Fragmentation of the Self is a continental psychoanalytic project on queer solitude in the Global South and Asian trans melancholia. I consider how the subject becomes fragmented in solitude for some queer subjects from the Global South who do not have access to queer communities. Through Freud’s notion of melancholia and Anne Anlin Cheng’s account of racial melancholia, I argue that fragmentation may open the possibility for alternative forms of relationality within the subject. It is an interdisciplinary project that combines Asian diasporic studies, queer and trans studies, and critical disability and crip studies.