Katrien Jacobs
I am academic and artistic researcher employed as Associate Professor in digital media and communication at Monash University, Malaysia. I am also affiliated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and with the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Ghent.
I have lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender in and around digital media, contemporary arts, online activism and Artificial Intelligence. I am now completing Deepfake Bodies: The Sexual Politics of AI, a book and art project that questions GenAI technology and its models of generating bodies, gender and sexuality.
As an artist-scholar I have produced several art works, documentaries and performance art pieces alongside my academic, curatorial and ethnographic fieldwork. My artwork can be characterized as tragi-comic and absurdist media and performative reflections on our immersion in digital media and AI . In 2024 I was granted an art residency at the Bogliasco Center to initiate an art project about deepfake bodies. I developed The Wet Ones, a video installation and performance-lecture involving a drag persona “Dr. Jacobs” and a making of new humanoid water creatures. As a research fellow at the University of Grenoble Alpes in Spring 2026 I was able to fine-tune, film, edit, synthesize and rehearse the component of this artwork.
As an academic, I am critical and open-minded thinker in sexuality studies who investigates the interplay between changing media environments and techno-politics. In 2022 I published Tit-For-Tat Media: The Contentious Bodies and Sex Imagery of Political Activism (UK and USA, Routledge). The book examines social media discourses in China, Hong Kong and the EU in the field of online activism and sex/gender politics with a particular focus on the protest years of 2018-2020. Presenting a socially engaged theory of “tit-for-tat media” and including case-studies on political movements such as the 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.
My 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. My 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.
https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/katrien-jacobs
https://www2.crs.cuhk.edu.hk/faculty-staff/adjunct-professors/katrien-jacobs