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Prof. Katrien JACOBS

Prof. Katrien JACOBS

Adjunct Associate Professor

Ph.D. (University of Maryland, College Park)

About Prof. Katrien JACOBS

Katrien Jacobs is Adjunct Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also an Associate Researcher in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Ghent. Jacobs has lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender in and around digital media, contemporary arts and online activism. She received several Hong Kong government-funded GRF grants and authored four books about Internet culture and gender/sexuality.

 

In 2022 she published Tit-For-Tat Media: The Contentious Bodies and Sex Imagery of Political Activism (London and New York: Routledge, 2022). The book examines the visual-sexual turn in social media discourses in the field of online activism with a particular focus on the extraordinary protest years of 2018-2020.  Presenting a socially engaged theory of “tit-for-tat media” and including case-studies on activist movements such as the Euro-American alt-right, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and revolutionary artists in China, this study reveals how visual cultures, including gendered or sexualized imagery, are utilised to influence public perception.

 

Her first book Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) received critical claim amongst media scholars for tracking emerging sex and online porn cultures that challenged hetero-sexism in censorship regulations and the economies of corporate expansionism. Her books People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Bristol: Intellect, 2012) and The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China (New York: Palgrave, 2015) were pioneering studies of mainland China’s immersion in new trends in sexually explicit media and gender inclusivity. They were widely commented on in academia and the news media. 

 

Jacobs is an artist-scholar who has produced several art works such as documentaries and performance art pieces alongside her academic, curatorial and ethnographic fieldwork, which can be accessed on her website www.katrienjacobs.com.

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  • Research Interests
    • Digital Media and Culture, Gender/Sexuality, Chinese and East- Asian Media, Contemporary Art, Social Movements
  • RECENT Research Projects
    1. 2019-2020 CUHK Direct Grant ‘The Online Nativist Imagination and Sex/Gender Discourses in Hong Kong and Belgium.’ 
    2. 2015-2018 General Research Fund (GRF) ‘Trans-Asian Women's Forum on Erotic/Pornographic Media and Cultural Affect’ 
    3. 2016-2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Council ‘The Ghost of Sister Ping,’ Symposium and video Installation about the power and suffering of a female ghost.
    4. 2009-2012 General Research Fund (GRF) ‘Gothic Lolita Unchained: The Appropriation of Japanese Japanese Animation Narratives and Aesthetics in Chinese Digital Media Contexts’
  • REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
    Books
    1. 2022 Tit-For-Tat Media: The Contentious Bodies and Sexual Imagery of Political Activism (London and New York, Routledge)
    2. 2015 The Afterglow of Chinese Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan)
    3. 2012 People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Bristol: Intellect Books)
    4. 2007 NetPorn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield)

     

    Journal articles
    1. 2022 (Forthcoming) The Pepe the Frog Image-meme in Hong Kong: Visual Recurrences and Gender Fluidity on the LIHKG Forum, Journal for Digital Social Research
    2. 2022 The Feminist who died (and came back) DiGest: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, Ageivism Roundtable, 9:1, 19-22
    3. 2020 Smouldering Pornographies on the Chinese Internet, Porn Studies, published online first June, 2020
    4. 2018 Women's Sex/Porn Sanctuaries and Social Movements in Hong Kong and San Francisco. Porn Studies, Published Online March 7, 2018.
    5. 2016 Out of Thousands and Thousands of Thoughts: Wandering the Streets of the Hong Kong umbrella movement. Educational Philosophy and Theory, Published Online April 27 2016.
    6. 2016 Disorderly Conduct: Feminist Nudity in Chinese Protest Movements,' Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society, 19. 7, 819-835.

     

    Book chapters
    1. 2022  Send Them to Mars! Radical Online Erotica and Civil Rights in Hong Kong, In James Welker ed. Queer Transfigurations: Boys’ Love Media in Asia. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press)
    2.  2019  Hong Kong Women’s Boys’ Love Protest and the Drifting Gaze. In Fusami Ogi, Kazumi Nagaike and Rebecca Suter eds. Women’s Manga in Asia: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan) 39-51.
    3. 2017 Male and Female Idols of the Chinese Pornosphere, In Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, Eds. Koichi Iwabuchi, Chris Berry and Eva Tsai (London: Routledge),pp. 202-212

 

>>  Her work can be found www.katrienjacobs.com

>>  Click here to view the detailed CV of Prof. Katrien JACOBS.