Katrien Jacobs is associate professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. Jacobs has lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender in and around digital media, contemporary arts and online activism. She received several Hong Kong government-funded research grants and authored four books about Internet culture, activism and gender/sexuality in Chinese societies. She is currently writing a new monograph about Artificial Intelligence and Deepfake creativity and its impact on global gender/sex cultures.

In 2022 she published Tit-For-Tat Media: The Contentious Bodies and Sex Imagery of Political Activism (London and New York: Routledge, 2022). The book examines the visual-sexual turn in social media discourses in the field of online activism includes case-studies on the Euro-American far-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.

Her 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. Her 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. 

Jacobs is an artist-scholar who has produced several art works such as documentaries and performance art pieces alongside her academic, curatorial and ethnographic fieldwork. She was awarded a felllowship and art residency at the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy in 2024.

She is also affiliated with the Department of Cultural and Religious studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Associate Researcher in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Ghent. 

Her work can be accessed on her website www.katrienjacobs.com.

My research lies at the intersection of Digital Media and Cultures and Gender/Sexuality Studies. I am currently carrying out research about online deepfake creativity and how human bodies and post-human hybrids are being created as artworks and popular-massive online content.

I carry out research alongside art and curatorial projects about embodiment and gender, data politics and identity, gender wars and empowerment, avatar agency within immersive and synthetic media.

Recent projects include:

Bogliasco Foundation Residency, Sept-Oct 2024

The residency supported research activities and dialogues towards a book and video installation about reclaiming deepfake bodies and politics.

Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund (GRF)

2022 General Research Fund (GRF) ‘Hyper-Cute Avatars for Civic Engagement and Social Change'

2015-2018  General Research Fund (GRF) ‘Trans-Asian Women's Forum on Erotic/Pornographic Media and Cultural Affect’ HK$ 382,000

2009-2012  General Research Fund (GRF) ‘Gothic Lolita Unchained: The Appropriation of Japanese Animation Narratives and Aesthetics in Chinese Digital Media Contexts’

I am interested in supervising students in the areas of digital cultures, contemporray arts, AI and synthetic media, gender and sexuality studies, online activism and protest movements.