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, where I worked full-time from 2011-2022, 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 and online activism. I received several Hong Kong government-funded GRF grants. I have authored four books on gender, sexuality and digital media, I am now completing Deepfake Bodies: The Sexual Politics of AI, a book and art project that questions GenAI technology and its models of 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. In 2024 I was granted an art residency at the Bogliasco Center to initiate an art project about restorative deepfakes and body 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