People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet by Katrien Jacobs, and: Threat Talk: The Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction by Mary Manjikian (review)

At first, these two relatively short books appear to have little in common: People’s Pornography is a work of cultural studies that documents the ephemeral world of sex scandals, pornographic blogging, and alternative lifestyles on the Chinese Internet. In contrast, Threat Talk is a relatively staid work of comparative politics written by a professor of government. In fact, these two books have several things in common: both authors write about China, but neither is a China specialist; both self-consciously undertake interdisciplinary work and refuse to restrict themselves to narrow genre norms; and both are concerned with the way preexisting Chinese culture influences the reception and use of the Internet in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In addition, both works suffer from flaws that threaten to detract from their value, particularly for China specialists. Overall though, both books are welcome additions to the literature for the originality and importance of their topics, despite some weaknesses that might give some readers pause.

Katrien Jacobs has a long history of transgressing academic norms. Her PhD in comparative literature and media compared archaic rituals of body modification with the work of performance artists in the sixties and seventies. The method, as well as the subject, was transgressive: Jacobs’s dissertation combined written chapters with video clips of performance art. A more recent project on amateur net pornography continued her interest in media and the body by examining how the Internet creates spaces that enable novel forms of sexual expression. The last chapter of the book discusses pornography in China and reflects Jacobs’s move to Hong Kong, where she joined the faculty of the City University of Hong Kong (CUHK). This book is the full presentation of the material she discussed in the conclusion of her last book; Jacobs has now turned her focus to pornography in Hong Kong and China, more generally.

People’s Pornography is divided into five chapters. After a brief introduction, Jacobs takes us through a lengthy discussion of censorship and attempts at free speech in China and locates sexual expression and experimentation in that wider context. The second chapter—the longest and most focused of the book—provides an account of sex blogging on the Internet. A series of shorter chapters then documents a series of the author’s research projects: interviews with CUHK students about their consumption of pornography, Jacobs’s autoethnographic forays into an online dating and sex site, and, finally, a project on queer cosplay (costume play) and anime (animation) fans.

Jacobs brings a strong agenda to her book: to discover the joyful and exuberant sexual experimentation that people—but especially women—undertake on the Internet in their quest to free themselves from the oppressive Chinese state. At times it seems that the author’s strong agenda threatens to force itself on her material. This is especially true when it becomes apparent that many of the people Jacobs discusses are not actually that interested in a joyful exploration of sexual freedom. For instance, the female college students she interviews are more interested in watching romantic comedies than pornography (although Jacobs’s definition of pornography is sufficiently capacious to include the former in the later). Even her expectation that male students might engage in peer-to-peer collaborative sharing of pornography (as did the subjects of her previous book) is dashed. In fact, they do not share pornography because, as one respondent put it, their friends are “already overloaded” (p. 126) with huge collections of downloaded Japanese pornography.

It is impossible to miss the strong agenda that Jacobs brings to the book. To her credit, Jacobs never allows her predilections to shape the data. When the...