Since its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China has upheld a nationwide ban on pornography, imposing harsh punishments on those caught purchasing, producing, or distributing materials ...deemed a violation of public morality. A provocative contribution to Chinese media studies by a well-known international media researcher, People's Pornography offers a wide-ranging overview of the political controversies surrounding the ban, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the many distinct media subcultures that have gained widespread popularity on the Chinese Internet as a result. Rounding out this exploration of the many new tendencies in digital citizenship, pornography, and activist media cultures in the greater China region are thought-provoking interviews with individuals involved. A timely contribution to the existing literature on sexuality, Chinese media, and Internet culture, People's Pornography provides a unique angle on the robust voices involved in the debate over about pornography's globalization.
This article makes a case for sex-positive research and pedagogy that acknowledges and hence reflects on the researcher’s use of a “pornographic mirror,” a critical and consensual engagement with ...erotic and pornographic (self-)imagery that opens up bodily sensations and analysis in the public sphere. The article will do so by means of examples of research in which scholars were able to successfully test out such corporeal-driven scholarship and use of porn images. In the first example, the author interviewed an older generation of sex educators in San Francisco, who in the 1960s/1970s pioneered the idea that students could perform and analyze their own sexual behaviors by acting in, and reflecting on, sexually explicit movies, an idea which has also been incorporated into contemporary feminist and queer pornography. This historical moment in radical pedagogy is extended into a contemporary example of sex-positive research about online dating, in which the author comments on her use of sex chat and sexual self-imagery to dissect the online dating site adultfriendfinder.com.
This article investigates a transforming zeitgeist around DIY pornography, which is defined as diverse online pornographies and erotica that are made and distributed by amateurs or independent ...producers. DIY pornography embraces, according to Attwood, 'an ethos that extends across new and alternative sexual cultures, subcultural sexualities, kink communities, and the amateur pornographies that are part of a broader contemporary and participatory culture'. Since there has been an upsurge of deepfake porn and other hate media on digital platforms, how can we understand these porn cultures and how are they appropriating the ethos of DIY porn?
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.
A mixed reality (MR) represents an environment composed both by real and virtual objects. MR applications are used more and more, for instance in surgery, architecture, cultural heritage, ...entertainment, etc. For some of these applications it is important to merge the real and virtual elements using consistent illumination. This paper proposes a classification of illumination methods for MR applications that aim at generating a merged environment in which illumination and shadows are consistent. Three different illumination methods can be identified: common illumination, relighting and methods based on inverse illumination. In this paper a classification of the illumination methods for MR is given based on their input requirements: the amount of geometry and radiance known of the real environment. This led us to define four categories of methods that vary depending on the type of geometric model used for representing the real scene, and the sdifferent radiance information available for each point of the real scene. Various methods are described within their category.
The classification points out that in general the quality of the illumination interactions increases with the amount of input information available. On the other hand, the accessibility of the method decreases since its pre‐processing time increases to gather the extra information. Recent developed techniques managed to compensate unknown data with clever techniques using an iterative algorithm, hardware illumination or recent progress in stereovision. Finally, a review of illumination techniques for MR is given with a discussion on important properties such as the possibility of interactivity or the amount of complexity in the simulated illumination.
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 study 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 middle-aged 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 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.
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.
This 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 its ...relationship to social movements. Hong Kong in recent years has become an exemplary East Asian protest site where questions of feminism, LGBTQ rights and erotic entertainment are negotiated at the borders of a larger democracy movement. For decades, San Francisco has been a mecca for LGBTQ activism, while also being at the forefront of queer pornography industries. This cross-cultural study and its ethnographic encounters will highlight and compare manners of queering porn and politics, while offering an interpretation of Judith Butler's writings on performativity and assembly as a way to understand contemporary activism and body politics. Finally, in a push to decolonize the myth of San Francisco as the more ideal erotic city, the article reflects on geo-political shifts affecting counter-cultural legacies of sexual collectivity and entertainment, including ongoing real-estate speculation coinciding with a global upsurge of supremacist governments.
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