Katrien Jacobs

I am working on a presentation on “Algorithmic Bellyfat and Menopausal Rage” for a conference at University of Ghent, entitled ‘From unruliness to collective action: Challenging norms on gender and sexuality’ a conference organised by ECREA Gender & Communication:

Abstract:

This presentation will discuss social media algorithms and imagery for ageing women’s sexuality and hormonal or bodily changes during menopause. It will analyze a collection of archived visuals and animated ads from Facebook and Instagram that try to sell rules-based challenges and diet plans for women’s (menopausal) weight gain, with a focus on shedding subcutaneous belly fat. The grotesquely animated fat bellies have to get toned and eliminated through daily and hourly fitness routines, as customers sign up for  “health and wellness” packages designed by overly simplistic and misogynist AI models. The AI models that deliver these visuals on our social media feeds have been built on a decade-long robbery of women’s online data and have turned this wealth of information into an obsession with ageing and bellyfat. (Zuboff, 2019; Pasquinelli and Joler, 2020) These AI models also lead to misleading medical information such as the idea that subcutaneous belly fat is a menopausal symptom caused by a lack of estrogen levels in the body, which is still a contested fact in medical industries. Hence in this talk I hope to carry out a brief visual analysis and then discuss strategies of coping with incessantly ageist and sexist visual aesthetics, as well as algorithmic bias and misinformation. I hope that the talk could generate a further dialogue and shared reflections about women’s menopause and how to turn our social media feeds and rage into productive interventions.

My presentation is very visual and the text starts as follows: “I wake up to an image of an animated walking fat belly, a gross one as a matter of fact, that keeps appearing on my social media feeds. I keep getting images of old women with humongous bellies who need to be “whipped into shape.” Perhaps these cartoons look harmless or funny, but as it goes with social media algorithms: more more companies will find you with your ageing body and pot belly—the forces will seek you out and multiply. Soon you are swamped with this sort of imagery of “repulsive fat bellies”. The corporate-owned algorithm is making a prediction: ”You are an ageing woman so you also likely to have a fat belly, and secondly, you in one of the stages of your menopause. You are hormonally stressed and excitable, you will redirect this anger at your environment but mostly yourself and your body–your belly that is expanding and which bothers you. You are targeted as a “menopausal woman with rage and with fat belly” who can be somewhat salvaged with tons of exercise. But another prediction servie is added now: you can exercise all you want but your hormones are raging and you are in need of a stronger medical aid. “

Come find out what it will be. Online talk October 7, 2022. More info will follow and here some more of the images:

This course studies contemporary art systems and institutions as cultural forms within the broader ‘cultural ecology’ of modern cities. It considers the development of post-formalist art forms and time-based media such as installation art, digital media art, video art and performance art and how these art forms are employed within traditional art spaces, public spaces, social media platforms and activist movements.

The aim of the course is also to introduce students to a general historical framework of contemporary art with a focus on dialogic aesthetics and participatory art forms. The students will learn about movements and concepts and how to apply these discourses by researching artists as well as traditional and grassroots institution and cultural precincts. Finally, students will contribute to artistic discourses by curating an innovative work of contemporary art and artist residency. The course will outline institutional and promotional structures of art curating and the benefits of cultural interactivity and exchange.

Full Syllabus CULS5401-2020-dec28

Archive of student video-projects 2014-2021, consisting of  “interviews with artists” and “curatorial projects”

MARCH 2021, Students have submitted their final reflections about visits to galleries and museums on this padlet page.

https://padlet.com/cw2750/museumreflections

MARCH 2022 Work in Progress Final Projects “My Favorite Artist in Residency”

https://padlet.com/cw2750/CULS5401week7

https://padlet.com/cw2750/CULS5401Week11

Selection of presentation slides

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The MA in Visual Culture Studies is a unique theory/practice curriculum around analytical knowledge and audio-visual media production to study Contemporary Art, Digital Media, Virtual Reality and Immersive Media and Film/Documentary cultures. On this site you can find information about the different courses that were taught 2007-2020, as well as extra-curricular events and student projects.

The website is located at http://www.vcs.crs.cuhk.edu.hk

The student videos can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3hcFBKB-2cDCimIsqBD0Ow/videos

http://libidot.org/wp/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/MAVCS-完整版-第7版-2020.10.26.pdf

After visiting the revamped Africa museum in Tervuren, Brussels, which commemorates our colonial heritage in a supposedly introspective and decolonizing fashion, I was asked by one of the “friendly museum guides” on the scenic ride of tram 44 what I really thought about it, I told him that I did not like it all. He told me to report my criticism on the museum website, but here I slam it on my own blog.

Without having the time to go into details, I think that this internationally applauded “decolonizing” museum  is now at once one of Belgium’s lamest and most offensive museums. It does not bother me too much that the exhibits are hodgepodge and very cheaply designed, the stolen objects and taxidermic animals from our brutal heritage creating a cozy fleamarket atmosphere that our Belgium is known for. What bothers me is the lack of care and communication about our forms of brutal exploitation in the colony, the vagueness of descriptions on most of the labels and mission statements, so that it is really not clear what kind of slavery economy and cultural soft power Leopold II had put into place. I noticed a crude denial and many attempts to “remain neutral” amongst a nearly-formal and proud display of mines and minerals, exotically exuberant fauna and flora, offensively colonial statues of serving and nakedly clad primitives, a long engraved list of Belgians who died in the colony without a much longer Congolese counter-list. A few of those ugly-racist sculptures have been “taken away” from the museum and assembled in one separate room for our critical gaze, but many other of those sculptures , as stated on the signs, “could not be removed” from museum halls. Indeed the main slogan of the museum “Everything Passes, Except the Past” here means that the museum itself is stuck in its colonial “human zoo” mentality. It was built by Leopold II and opened in 1910 as a way to showcase his wealth and dark-enlightenment worldview on how to rule Africans, who were also literally put on display in Belgium in 1897. As in other sites of historical commemoration and apology, it should mean that we sense the pain and humiliation as atmosphere of destruction, and ongoing post-colonial strife on how to negotiate cultural relations, but perhaps not the kind of  cowardice and  silliness that is now the main tenet of this revamped museum.

Or perhaps the silliness of the Belgians, in itself a crude stereotype that unites the Flemish and Walloons, comes in handy for this museum, and it was well covered by Trevor Noah in the Daily Show:

And of course my full applause goes to the VRT series “Kinderen Van de Kolonie” (in French and Dutch) which is also airing this Fall and does apologize to the Congolese. This TV documentary series evokes the full horror of colonial violence  by opening up harsh views and Congolese responses, and its complexity is full of feeling.

 

 

I exit my apartment in Aalmoezenierstraat, Sint-Andries, Antwerp, and cross the road to the Salvation Army, where I buy myself a used red duffelcoat for 7,50 euro. It is a nostalgic choice as I have already owned and discarded many a red coat. My mother Annette Van Dijck gave me hers on one of my last visits before her death. I put it on and walked around with an air of contentment, but it was too large on the shoulders. My mothers was into the Lady Di look and had favored stately, broad-shouldered garments and epaulettes.

It took my mother many years to die and she somehow kept up her strength to the last minute, even though she was stranded in bed for many months, she would push her self around using doorhandles, walls and cabinets. She refused to get any kind of walking aids or medical personnel inside her apartment, and wanted to suffer and die alone. Her mother, my grandmother Helene Siebelinck-Van Dijck had equally lost all social contact towards the end of her life, complaining for many years that it had been enough. She grew up in an upper-middle class family who owned a lucrative brewery in the village of Wouw, just across the Dutch border, her husband was a well-off doctor who died himself of tuberculosis but did not leave behind a large trust fund. There were eleven children in the Van Dijck family and, as one of the only girls, Annette was ordered to take up odd jobs and start feeding the family, a role that she would (rightfully) resent for the rest of her life.

Annette was more integrated in the small Flemish village than was her mother Helene and she kept a certain joi de vivre when she was dying, kept driving her Berlino to the Delhaize down the road and cooking fancy meals, taking fairly large doses of morphine as she got closer to death, binge-reading her thick novels and watching plenty of TV. In this way she was a kind of role-model for how to depart.

A few years before her death, when my sister Mieke was still alive, we had a family gathering and we browsed through my mother’s collection of coats. Mieke handed me one of Annette’s heavy blacks with ostentatious fur collar—I paraded in the apartment and then we walked outside into the woods. It was frosty and drizzling and the sun was setting even though it had never shown that day.  We buttoned  our coats and put on woolen hats, scarves and gloves, walked slowly, slipped on the ice, coughed and giggled, my confused American husband following our trails into the reeking Flemish fields.

And now I feel my mother’s coats again in the Salvation Army. I talk to Yvonne, an old Dutch lady with silver curly long hair and stark blue eyes who runs its second-hand clothing shop. She opens it every Wednesday afternoon and I sneak into her shop to chat with her and to buy the various pieces of my sabbatical wardrobe. Yvonne talks to me non-stop and also makes sure that I don’t make any rash choices, guiding me through her erratic collections to a hidden mirror in the backroom. She orders me to zip up coats and move my arms around to make sure they are the right size.

She not is devoid of deep feeling as she now tends to her teeny dog, a Japanese ‘Chin’ who is sleeping in a very small cardboard basket. She named her dog Chinny so that she actually could remember the dog’s breed. Chinny has been her companion of ten years but is very ill as a large gland has slipped out of  her“female cavity,” she had been stitched up by the vet but kept pulling out the stitches and making a small mess on the floor of the Salvation. I was looking away when I thought I heard Yvonne say that she was actually ready to put Chinny under, that Chinny had no energy left, that it was time too much for her and she had do so. I had heard it all before. But when I looked up Yvonne said that she would take her to the vet the next day and she would probably be totally fine.

When I visited three days later to check up on Chinny, the minuscule dog had indeed made a full recovery. After taking some medication her gland had slipped back right into her female cavity. She had been moved inside a proper dog basket and she was already starting to tease and pester Yvonne for food.

Louise Bak of the radio program Sex City (Toronto) has been one of the most attentive readers of my books. Here is a long interview with musical interludes about The Afterglow of women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China

I launched my new book The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China in the ACO book store in Hong Kong. It was a cathartic kind of event, as the launch can be for the author who finally exits a space of desolation and mental exhaustion while trying to communicate with the outer world. Egret Chow delivered a testimony about being labeled  “left-over woman” in mainland China–the class of women who defy the patriotic push to marry and procreate.

In my book I also write about ghost fictions and propose a notion of phantom feminism based on Jack Halberstam’s theory of shadow feminism and Judith Zeitlin’s feminist reading of ancient ghost stories.(1) I had a chat about this with Ling Tang, a Ph.D. student in sociology who could not endorse “phantom feminism” and perhaps believed that I should be more attentive to the material realm of sexual relations and sexual politics. But then I have been stuck inside the porn0-mediated-realm for a while and still believe in its unique affect.

Hence there is a chapter pornographic Boys’ Love manga and online fictions, the extensive subcultures of women’s gay erotica that have very little to do with their embodied sexual practices. The news media have recently tried to probe the complex erotic fantasies of these “straight” woman but straight is also an inadequate label. In Australia they used to label it “bent”–these women and their fantasies are not straight, not lesbian, not trans, not perv, but just slightly bent.

 

(1) Zeitlin, Judith (1994) “Shared Dreams: The Story of the Three Wives’ Commentary on the Peony Pavillion,” In Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 54:1, pp. 127-179; Zeitlin, Judith T (2007) The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in 17^th Century Chinese Literature, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.