Hyaesin Yoon

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 (Duke University Press, February, 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 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 written, installation, and performance arts by East Asian writers and artists 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.

Selected Invited Talks and Conference Presentations:

• “‘Warm Robots’ for Autistic Children?,” presented at the planetary session of the Conference of Korean Association of Women's Studies , Seoul National University (November 2024)
• "Mechanical embodiment and Inhuman Desire in Geumhyung Jeong and Mire Lee," presented at the annual conference of Gender Studies Assosiation Austria, Graz (September 2024)
• "Puppeteering Desire: Or, How to Race Inhuman Sexuality in Geumhyung Jeong’s Performance Arts," presented at the 12th New Materialisms Conference, National University of Ireland, Maynooth (August 2024)
• “Prosthetic Memories: Diasporic Poetics from A Future,” presented at Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul (December 2022).
• “‘Warm Robots’ for Autistic Children?,” presented at the Korean Studies Distinguished Lecture Series, University of Edinburgh (March 2021)
• “Speciating Humans: the becoming-geography of history in Sylvia Wynter’s Homo Narrans,” presented at the European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Athens (2019)
• “Margaret Rhee’s Poetry Machine: The Technology of Difference, Love,” presented at the 6th Yun Bosun Memorial Symposium, hosted by Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh (2018)
• “When all the traffic lights turn red: the color of robot-love-poetry,” presented at the European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Copenhagen (2018)
• “The Remnants of the Biotech Boom: Non-human Animals as Surplus Bodies in the Transnational Cloning Industry,” presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Washington DC (2018)
• “The Erotics of Singularity,” presented at Power and the Chthulucene symposium, Uppsala University, Sweden (2017)
• “Feral Affect: Animal Bodies and/as Border Technologies,” delivered at TEMA GENUS Higher Seminar Series at Linkoping University, Sweden (2016)
• “Feral Bodies and In/Secure Borders: Monkeys, Terrorists, and Ebola,” presented at Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference, Dallas (2014)
• “The Biopolitics of Memory in Transnational Pet Cloning,” presented at Society for Literature Science and the Arts annual conference, University of Notre Dame (2013)
• “In Loving Memory: Rendering Clones, Wombs, and Meat in Commercial Pet Cloning,” Presented at Funny Kinds of Love: The Ethics and Affects of Human-Animal Relationships, Center for Science, Technology, Media & Society, University of California, Berkeley (2013)

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)