Hyaesin Yoon

Position: 
Interim director of the Doctoral Program in Critical Gender Studies
Rank: 
Associate Professor

Contact information

Building: 
Vienna, Quellenstrasse 51
Room: 
A205
Phone: 
+43 1 25230 7111*3845

My areas of interest include biopolitics, postcolonial critiques, posthumanisms, performance and literary theories, and feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine. My current research focuses on assemblages of humans, other animals, and technologies. I’m curious about how these assemblages mediate the relations of sex/gender, race, disability, and species in a transnational context, and what kinds of ethics and aesthetics might arise from there.

My forthcoming book Prosthetic Memories: Postcolonial Feminisms in a More-Than-Human-World (in press with Duke University Press, Spring 2025) examines the ethics of embodied memory in an age of transnational mobility and biotechnology by examining the diasporic tongue (as both language and organ), animal cloning, and human stem cell research across the United States and South Korea.

I’m incubating a new art-based research project, tentatively titled Anything Beautiful is Worth Getting Hurt For (borrowed from the lyrics of a song by Prince). This project explores techno-humanimal affective (dis)embodiments in contemporary installation and performance arts by East Asian artists and dancers in transnational contexts.

My another research project concerns the relationship between children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the elderly with dementia, and smart technologies, such as AI and robots in South Korea. Fundamentally interdisciplinary, this project invites conversations among queer-feminist theories, critical disability studies, and East Asian science and technology studies.

  • "'Warm Robots' for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?: The Thermodynamics of Sociality, Humanity, and Techno-society in South Korea," accepted, expected to appear in 2024 Spring issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience.
  • "A Correspondence with Two Artists" (also translated in Korean, "두 작가와의 서신" ), in All About Love (Seoul: ARKO Art Center, 2022), exhibition catalogue
  • "The Erotics of Singularity and the Biopolitics of Intimacy,” a special issue of Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies, revised and resubmitted.  
  • “The Biopolitics of Languaging in the Cybernetic Fold: A Decolonial and Queer Ear to the Cosmo-poetics,” a special issue on Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Cosmopolitics for the Journal of Gender Studies 29.1 (2020)
  • “Feral Biopolitics: Animal Bodies and/as Border Technologies,” Tranimacies: Intimate Links between Animal and Trans* Studies, special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22.2 (2017)
  • “Disappearing Bitches: Canine Affect and Postcolonial Bioethics,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology 24. 3 (2016)
  • Book Review, “Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 9.1 (2015)

Selected Courses taught at CEU

Gender, Sexuality, and the Non/Human (MA, PhD)

Feminist Biopolitics and Cultural Practices (MA, PhD)

Performing Arts, Research, and the Public (MA, PhD)

AIs, Robots, and the Genres of the Human (BA)

Qualification

PhD, Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
MA, Gender Studies, Seoul National University
BA, Communication, Seoul National University

Projects with involvement of Hyaesin Yoon