Hyaesin Yoon

Her areas of interest include biopolitics, postcolonial critiques, posthumanisms, performance and literary theories, and feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine. Her current research focuses on assemblages of humans, other animals, and technologies. She is 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 them.

Her 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 analyzing the diasporic tongue (as both language and organ), animal cloning, and human stem cell research across the United States and South Korea.

She is 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.

Another of her research projects 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.