Jessie Taieun Yoon

Summary

Jessie Taieun Yoon (they/them) is a non-binary East Asian femme, an emerging academic, a tenaciously detailed translator, and a ranting queer activist. 

Their doctoral research delves into a performative construction of East Asian femininities in the diaspora. The question that propels their research is how aesthetic performances constitute racialized queer politics that challenge existing structures of power, especially with regards to femininities. More broadly, they are interested in any interchanges between queer politics and aesthetics, manifested through artworks, sensibilities, and cultural phenomena. Some other topics that excite them include QTIPOC subculture and its minoritarian aesthetics; East Asian queer politics as well as Western discourses on them; camp sensibility and dis/identification; feminist affects and Somatechnics; contemporary art theories; conditions of knowledge production and Critical University Studies; Museum and Curatorial Studies and so much more.

They have completed their BA in Aesthetics with a minor in Sociology (Seoul National University, Summa cum Laude) and their MSc in Gender, Media, and Culture (London School of Economics and Political Science, Distinction). Their master's dissertation "Queerly Femme-inine Elsewhere: Rethinking Femme-ininity as Camp Disidentificatory Sensibility of QTIPOC Femmes" suggests thinking of QTIPOC femme-ininity as a camp sensibility to resolve some pressing problems of visibility impasse that they see as having been insufficiently tackled by femme corporeal turn. 

More information including some excerpts of their written work can be found at jessieyoon.com. Or, you can find them wandering through second-hand shops or following cats in London, Malmö, Seoul, and Ithaca, NY.