The Afterglow of Women's Pornography in Post-Digital China by Katrien Jacobs (review)

In The Afterglow of Women's Pornography in Post-Digital China, Katrien Jacobs is "interested in finding out how Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese women are experiencing eroticism and why they are becoming less reproduction minded" (p. 7). An Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Jacobs is a Belgian-born academic originally focused on Euro-American performance art and amateur pornography who developed an interest in Chinese populations' use of sexual media when she took a position in Hong Kong. Her 2012 book People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet studied women's relationship to a sex industry that the Chinese Communist Party simultaneously denounces as immoral and encourages as an area of capitalist entrepreneurialism. In that book, Jacobs relates women's use of the internet for sexual expression and empowerment to their quest for greater civil liberties under an authoritarian government. She brings the same concern with how sexual and political liberties intersect to The Afterglow of Women's Pornography, though perhaps with less success.

The book's five chapters primarily explore some aspect of mainland and Hong Kong women's consumption of pornography and their navigation of societal expectations regarding dating, marriage, and procreation. In chapter 1, "Women's Drifting Eyeballs and Porn Tastes," Jacobs discusses ten workshops she conducted in Hong Kong in 2012. Jacobs recruited heterosexual, lesbian, and "sexually undecided" women for 90-minute sessions in which she screened segments from hard-core, female-friendly, and queer pornography and then documented the discussions that followed. "It will be shown that Hong Kong women are rewriting the rules of taste and arousal," she writes at the start of this chapter (p. 24). After walking us through the participants' reactions to what they viewed (Japanese s/m, egalitarian, and gay male porn), she concludes the chapter less dramatically: "It is fair to say that women enjoyed morphing between masculine and feminine, straight and same-sex viewing positions" but "rejected Western taste cultures and were dismissive of their emancipatory and identity politics" (pp. 48, 49). Demonstrating the "drifting eyeballs" or open-ended curiosity characteristic of porn-viewing in many countries, Hong Kong women do not come off as having a particularly unique take on this media. Jacobs also does not succeed in establishing a relationship between the women's curiosity in pornography and their investment in the democracy movement exploding on the streets at the time of the study. The chapter's last sentence is typical of the way the book as a whole yokes sexual and political activity together without articulating a necessary connection between them: "Hong Kong women overall remained ambivalent about our porn selections while grappling with a current crisis in political leadership and fighting for a civil society," she writes (p. 49).

Chapter 2, "Wandering Scholars and the Teachings of Ghosts," analyzes the sexualized ghost figure in ancient Chinese literature as well as in modern Hong Kong film. Jacobs looks at narratives in which a male character is visited by a sexually-powerful female specter, resulting in the resolution of a crisis. She readily admits that the plotlines reinforce male primacy by positioning female sexuality as transgressive and secondary but stresses that the moments of excessive queer pleasure threaten to overwhelm the stories' conservative conclusions. Drawing on Jack Halberstam's concept of "shadow feminism," Jacobs identifies a "phantom feminism [that] is a kind of force that does not transform but rather haunts and disrupts the heteronormative structure" (p. 75).

In chapter 3, "Message on the Body in the Chinese Netsphere," Jacobs turns from the display of naked bodies for purposes of arousal to their online display as forms of protest or acts of ideological contestation. This chapter provides a wonderful overview of what Jacobs calls "naked activism," beginning with the self-display of younger feminist and queer netizens protesting sexual and domestic abuse, moving...