Katrien Jacobs is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Program Director of the MA in Visual Culture Studies. She has lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender in and around digital media, contemporary arts and media activism. She moved to Hong Kong in 2005 and devotes most of her research to contemporary Chinese, Japanese and trans-Asian arts and media platforms.

She received two Hong Kong government-funded GRF grants; one to research the impact of Japanese animation cultures on social media and gender in Greater China (2010-2013), and one to research Chinese women’s cultural identities and affect around sexually explicit media (2014-2017).

Jacobs has authored three books about Internet culture and sexuality. Her first book Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) received critical claim amongst media scholars as a pioneering study of emerging web cultures that challenge government regulations and the aims of corporate expansionism. Her book People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Intellect Books, 2012) investigates mainland China’s immersion in new trends in sexually explicit media. It was widely commented on in academia and the news media as a pioneering study of China’s unwieldy sex entertainment and surveillance society. A summary and reviews can be found here

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4813

Her most recent book The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) focuses on feminist and queer media cultures of sexuality and activism that have defined Chinese gender controversies in the social media age.

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-afterglow-of-womens-pornography-in-postdigital-china-katrien-jacobs/?isb=9781137485175

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