Overview
Jessie Taieun Yoon (they/them) is a non-binary East Asian femme who ponders upon all things feminine and feminized. They are a PhD candidate in Performing and Media Arts, a tenaciously detailed translator, and a sarcastic queer activist. They research the performative construction of Asia as queerly feminine, inquiring into Asia as transnational racial geography and its cultural, sexual, queer, trans, and feminist politics. Their dissertation “Pretense: Performing Asia as Queerly Feminine in Transnational Artworlds” delves into contemporary performances, exhibitions, and media of various genres that incorporate distinctly Asian aesthetics in its bliss and biases.
Broadly, they are interested in the intersection between aesthetics and politics of racialized sexuality as manifested through artworks, sensibilities, and cultural phenomena. Some other topics that excite them include QTIPOC subculture and its minoritarian aesthetics, Orientalism and Ornamentalism, femme camp and its disidentification, feminist affects and Somatechnics, contemporary art theories, museum, exhibition, and curatorial studies and so on - constantly expanding in real time. They teach feminism, queer and trans of color theory, and performance, media, and cultural studies, while pursuing a graduate minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies.
Yoon completed their Bachelor of Arts in Aesthetics with a minor in Sociology at Seoul National University, graduating Summa cum Laude. They also earnt their Master of Science in Gender, Media, and Culture at London School of Economics and Political Science with Distinction. Their master's dissertation "Queerly Femme-inine Elsewhere: Rethinking Femme-ininity as Camp Disidentificatory Sensibility" offers a novel perspective on QTIPOC femme-ininity as a camp sensibility to address the visibility impasse that they see as having been insufficiently tackled by the femme corporeal turn. This study was presented at Liminal: Critical Femininities Conference 2022 at York University and published alongside other proceedings at the Center for Feminist Research. It can be accessed via this link: https://www.yorku.ca/cfr/wp-content/uploads/sites/255/2021/09/Jessie-Taieun-Yoon-Queerly-Feminine-Elsewhere.pdf
Their scholarly work has been presented, published, or is forthcoming in Feral Feminisms, Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Association for Asian American Studies conference, Sexuality Studies Association at Canadian Congress for the Humanities, and more. For more detailed information, please visit jessieyoon.com. Alternatively, you can find them exploring galleries, walking through second-hand shops, or following cats in Malmö, London, Seoul, and Ithaca, NY during term time.