Overview
Jessie Taieun Yoon (they/them) is a non-binary East Asian femme, an emerging academic, a tenaciously detailed translator, and a sarcastic queer activist. They research the performative construction of East Asian femininities in diaspora, with a focus on their sexual politics, feminine strategies of perseverance, and seemingly passive attractions as power.
The question that propels Yoon’s research is how aesthetic performances of femininity, sexuality and sensuality constitute racialized queer politics. Broadly, they are interested exploring the intersections between politics of racialized sexuality and aesthetics, 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 dis/identification, feminist affects and Somatechnics, contemporary art theories, museum, exhibition and curatorial studies and so on - constantly expanding in real time.
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 LSE (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
Presentations and Publications
Yoon’s article, “Pretense: The Tense Interplay of Aesthetic Excess and Affective Absence in Asian Diasporic Femininities,” is forthcoming in Feral Feminisms as part of the special issue Excess: The Intersections of Critical Femininities, Mad Studies, and Critical Disabilities.
At AAAS 2023 (Association for Asian American Studies Conference), Yoon presented “Oriental Ways of Doing Orientalism: Comparative Reflections on Eiko Otake & Sin Wai Kin’s Performances.” This study was a part of a pre-constituted panel titled The Orientalist Complex and Public Imagination in the Age of Global Contemporary Art which was recruited through and sponsored by Verge: Global Asias journal.
At SCMS 2023 (Society for Media and Cinema Studies) Yoon delivered a presentation titled “Kkotkkotham: Queerly feminine perseverance within East Asian diasporic performances.” This presentation was part of a Queer and Trans Caucus-sponsored panel titled Producing and (Re)Imagining Queer and Trans Potentiality. Yoon’s study and their conference trip were awarded by Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities President’s Travel Fund for the Humanities as well as SCMS’s Asian/Pacific American Caucus’ graduate student travel award.
Yoon was invited to participate at the roundtable Critical Femininity Studies: A Roundtable on Current Questions and New Directions at the Sexuality Studies Association conference at Congress 2023 in Toronto, Canada.
For more detailed information, please visit jessieyoon.com. Alternatively, you can find them exploring second-hand shops or following cats in London, Malmö, Seoul, and Ithaca, NY.