Katrien Jacobs

Pornography in small places and other spaces

This article investigates pornographic web-based media at a time when commercial pornography has flooded the Internet and pockets of sex activism are budding alongside the porn boom. Pornography moving freely across borders is foremost a capitalist vision, but the web’s sexual potency is equally defined by web users and artists who visit and maintain peer-to-peer networks for producing and sharing sexually explicit materials. Revisiting Foucault’s notion of space as ‘heterotopia’, networked sexual communication and pornography are shown to permeate physical places and other spaces. Web users cultivate attachments to everyday places and spaces other than the ones they routinely inhabit. Networked sexual agency materializes desire far beyond the confines of community rituals and commodity industries. Besides the fact that porn industries expand their markets and diversify products, sex communities emerge alongside these markets and play a vital role in negotiating sexuality. The article shows how the Internets decentralized mechanisms of power and communication, including debating societies and playgrounds, have entered the realm of online porn and sexuality. Developing a theoretical notion of space as other spaces, the article unfolds the sexual web as exuberant, dispersed in bodies and cultures, yet forcefully regulated by global corporations and nation-state governments.

Sex Scandal Science in Hong Kong

This article gives an overview of my experience as a researcher using visual ethnography and sex studies to probe hidden strands of Chinese sex culture. More specifically, it shows how sexually explicit materials and sex studies became influential to undergraduate students at City University of Hong Kong on my course, ‘Gender Discourse’, in 2008 as a result of a celebrity sex scandal. The article considers the production and circulation of DIY pornographies made by ordinary people and attributed to celebrities by journalists, emotive and politicized reactions to pornographic media and sex scandals, and the development of teaching which encourages students to carry out creative experiments as sexually active subjects in media environments.

Internationalizing porn studies

Porn studies are currently dominated by European and American scholarly networks. This article looks at how the field might broaden its scope to include non-western media and cultural contexts. Using an example of porn research in Japan and China, it is argued that non-western pornographies are not just a set of global and regional cultures to be mapped and studied, but are a tool for interrogating broader questions of technological innovation, internet politics, sexuality rights and obscenity legislation. Porn studies can and should deal with these larger cultural–political debates and social movements in addition to documenting different aesthetics of sexually explicit media.

Out of thousands and thousands of thoughts: Wandering the streets of the Hong Kong umbrella movement

Abstract This essay discusses methods of pedagogy and educational philosophy stirred up by the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement/Occupy-Hong Kong Movement at the end of 2014. It situates these events as a way to envision a new type of public university. To this end, the essay proposes a model of ‘wandering scholarship,’ in which educators and activists walk through urban environments and use dialogic esthetics to reclaim them as ‘Commons.’ Wandering means a multisensory exploration and learning based on the historical concept of ‘psychogeography,’ a drifting through sites and interpellation of their embedded ideologies. As opposed to traditions of introspective wandering, this kind of ‘dialogic wandering’ is done within groups and encourages people to talk to fellow-walkers or random bystanders. As will be shown, these modes of wandering while addressing publics were pioneered in the 1960s student movements and also adopted in a unique manner by the young activists of the Umbrella Movement. Dialogic wandering leads to affective languages and embodied learning as opposed to modes of analytical reasoning and logic within higher education. To further study the impact of this aspect of social movements within a university curriculum, it will be shown by means of example how students can meaningfully adopt dialogic wandering to survey people’s affect and ideological positioning within environments.

Disorderly conduct: Feminist nudity in Chinese protest movements

The essay contributes to Cultural Studies as an evaluation of changing practices of media and social activism while highlighting theories of feminism and dialogic aesthetics. More specifically, it discusses women’s use of online self-photography as a protest medium and a platform for feminist activism within two distinctive protest movements, the Umbrella Movement of Fall 2014 and the mainland Chinese feminist movement of 2012–2013. Forerunners of these movements in mainland China can be found in the work of performance artists and sex bloggers such as Ye Haiyan and Muzimei, who have used bulletin board systems and blogs to lay bare their sex lives and the cultural mechanisms of misogyny. Their performances in public spaces and their online postings have also elicited public brawls and significant responses within governmental agencies (Farrer, 2007; Tong, 2011). The article posits that these discourses also have a historical lineage in the ‘light’ or ‘fleeting’ dissident writings of the Cultural Revolution that generated large-scale responses but did not aim at becoming earnest or solidified works of art (Voci, 2010). In this vein, nudity is employed to titillate and stir fellow netizens rather than offering a coherent and embodied stance. It offers flippant gestures and statements that come to signify ideology within online social movements.

Phantom feminism and the endless life of sex

As part of my research on sexually explicit art and media in mainland China and Hong Kong, I unfolded the theme of queer sexuality in historical ghost fictions and movies (Jacobs, 2015). Several years before doing this research, I also wrote a script for a short film and video installation, The Ghost of Sister Ping, which I eventually produced and exhibited in Fall 2017 in collaboration with a team of artists and the artspace Videotage. The story is set in contemporary Hong Kong and presents a young academic lecturer, Sister Ping, who is intellectually accomplished but socially awkward and sexually frustrated. These circumstances change when she develops a crush on an older male scholar who spends a semester at her university. The ghost narratives from the Ching and Ming Dynasties (1368–1864) and Hong Kong movies from the 1970s and 1980s also narrate stories concerning a middleaged scholar or functionary, usually a male and well-established person, who is derailed from an arduous task through the power of a sexualized ghost. In some of these movies, like Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1988) the viewer also becomes sympathetic to the ghost who wavers between earthly relations and her own tempestuous non-human realm. I borrowed this motif when featuring Sister Ping, a lecturer who has a deep crush but who is unable to realize sexual satisfaction and therefore walks towards her death amongst the stark mountainous landscapes of the Hong Kong New Territories. It had taken me several years to develop this ghost story and to apply for film funding from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. When I finally managed to get a film grant, the theme of the death wish caught up with my own deep personal distress, which included consecutive bouts of illness and the successive deaths of my sister and mother, This long process of anxiety and Sexualities 2018, Vol. 21(8) 1308–1312 ! The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1363460718790855 journals.sagepub.com/home/sex

Women's sex/porn sanctuaries and social movements in Hong Kong and San Francisco

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the views and activities of sex activists and entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and San Francisco who were interviewed about the topic of queer and feminist pornography and i...