Jessie Taieun Yoon

Jessie Taieun Yoon (they/them) is a non-binary East Asian femme who ponders upon all things feminine and feminized. They are a PhD candidate in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, as well as a passionate teacher, a tenaciously detailed translator, an attentive mentor, an enthused curator, and a pretentious critic.

Yoon researches the performative construction of Asianness as queerly feminine, inquiring into Asia as transnational racial geography and its sexual, queer, trans, and feminist politics.
Their dissertation “Pretense: Performing Asia as Queerly Feminine in Transnational Artworlds” examines contemporary performances and media that incorporate distinctly Asiatic racial aesthetics in its bliss and biases.

Their written works can be found or forthcoming at GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Theatre Journal, and Feral Feminisms. Broadly, they are interested in the intersection between aesthetics and politics of racialized sexuality as manifested through artworks, sensibilities, and cultural phenomena. They have taught and love to teach feminism, gender, and sexuality studies, queer and trans of color theory, and performance, media, film, and cultural studies. At Cornell, Yoon holds a graduate minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies.

They are a member of Diacritics journal’s editorial board (2025-26), and were a visiting research fellow at the division of Gender Studies in Lund University, Sweden in Fall 2025. In Spring 2026, Yoon was a proud recipient of the Diverse Knowledge East Asia fellowship from Cornell’s East Asia program, and held a visiting appointment in the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies (ACE) at Lund University. While living in the Öresund region, Yoon works as a member of the programming committee for MIX: Copenhagen, a 40-year old LGBTQ+ film festival.

They graduated Summa cum Laude for their Bachelors in Arts in Aesthetics from Seoul National University, having minored Sociology and Astrophysics. They also completed their Masters of Science in Gender, Media, and Culture at LSE (London School of Economics) with Distinction. For more recent updates, please see the “Recent Works” tab on this website.