Katrien Jacobs
A Profile
Katrien Jacobs is assistant professor in New Media at Emerson College. She studied at University of Maryland, College Park, where she wrote a Ph.D. thesis on dismemberment myths in '60s/'70s performance art. She has published several articles on pornography and new media art in journals such as Wide Angle and Cultural Studies, and is an emerging new media artist who carries out web-critiques involving the body, sound and performance art. A Ford Foundation Grant (-Ism, 1996) and Research and Learning Grant (Edith Cowan University, 1998) enabled her to conceptualize and carry out video/diversity teaching projects for students. Her documentary Joseph Beuys in America won a Rosebud Award in 1996 and was screened for PBS television and the American Film Institute. She is currently writing The Sound of One Hand Typing: Art, Sex and Netbook, a book covering new developments in porn undergrounds and sexuality on the Internet.Email: kjacobs@altern.org
On Technology
I agree with Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze and McKenzie Wark that new technologies should be viewed as unstable devices in their perpetual reorganisation of the human senses. In order for spectators to accept this point, virtual reality movies will have to speak to their senses. - Katrien JacobsFeminism and Masochism
About seven years ago, in her article ‘Daughter of the Movements: The psychodynamics of Lesbian s/m fantasy’, Julia Creet asked herself to what degree feminism as an intellectual and activist movement had lost its credibility with a younger generation of women in search of new definitions of sexuality. Due to feminism’s lack of recognition of masochism as a sexual identity, Creet pronounced a rebellion against feminist modes of public culture: "The symbolic Mother has come to be the repository of the prohibitions of feminism ... feminism itself has become a source of approval or disapproval." (1991: 144) As a supervising symbolic mother, American anti-pornography feminism in particular, has often denounced womens’ public sex work and/or pornographic artwork, thus supporting an alliance with right-wing censoring organs.
In Bad Girls and Sick Boys, Linda Kauffman demonstrates how the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography appropriated the extremist anti-porn arguments of feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin to issue extremist measures against pornographic film and photography. MacKinnon and Dworkin had negatively defined pornography as "the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically or in words." (Kauffman s.d.: 233-243) [...] http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/Katrien_Jacobs/articles/masochism/masochism.html
Maria Beatty
Katrien Jacobs: This is how it all started. When I first met Maria Beatty in New York , she was busy doing some mechanical work in a video archive and we started to talk about her work as a filmmaker and her media collaborations with famous performance artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle. She was a frail lady with permed blondish hair and she cycled her errands, literally, through the rowdy streets of New York City. Little did I know of the transformations that would take place inside this woman and that her personality would come to flower through a series of experiments which made her into a super-masochist and life-time submissive. You know how that goes with women: they lose weight and change their hairstyle. Maria BeattyBooks
- Women Filmmakers & Their Films (Women Filmmakers and Their Films) by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Editor), Amy L. Unterburger (Editor), Katrien Jacobs (Editor)
[1 book, Amazon US]
Katrien Jacobs is assistant professor in New Media at Emerson College. She studied at University of Maryland, College Park, where she wrote a Ph.D. thesis on dismemberment myths in '60s/'70s performance art. She has published several articles on pornography and new media art in journals such as Wide Angle and Cultural Studies, and is an emerging new media artist who carries out web-critiques involving the body, sound and performance art. A Ford Foundation Grant (-Ism, 1996) and Research and Learning Grant (Edith Cowan University, 1998) enabled her to conceptualize and carry out video/diversity teaching projects for students. Her documentary Joseph Beuys in America won a Rosebud Award in 1996 and was screened for PBS television and the American Film Institute. She is currently writing The Sound of One Hand Typing: Art, Sex and Netbook, a book covering new developments in porn undergrounds and sexuality on the Internet. - Re/Search Angry Women - Andrea Juno (Editor), V. Vale (Editor [1 book, Amazon US]
An enduring bestseller since its first printing in 1991, "Angry Women" has been equipping a new generation of women with an expanded vision of what feminism could be, influencing Riot Grrrls, neo-feminists, lipstick lesbians, and suburban breeders alike. A classic textbook widespread in college curriculae, Angry Women is the most influential book on women, culture, and radical ideology since The Second Sex."This is hardly the nurturing, womanist vision espoused in the 1970s. The view here is largely pro-sex, pro-porn, and pro-choice. Separatism is out, community in. Art and activism are inseparable from life and being." - The Village Voice
Juno publishes books on all aspects of modern culture, but especially those on the fringes -- the weird, the wacky, the downright disturbing. One recent title is Horror Hospital Unplugged.
In 1980, Andrea Juno co-founded Re/Search Publications. She has produced and edited 26 books and logged thousands of hours of recorded interviews with some of the most fascinating culture-shapers, from J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs to Diamanda Galas and Annie Sprinkle. In 1996, the company metamorphosed into Juno Books. [...] [...]
- Annie Sprinkle: Post-Porn Modernist - Annie Sprinkle [1 book, Amazon US]
Porn-star-turned-performance-artist Annie Sprinkle presents an illustrated history of her 25-year career, documenting her transformation from ugly duckling to prostitute to porn queen to sexual healer, activist, and educator. Although she began as "an excruciatingly shy girl" selling popcorn at an adult theater showing Deep Throat, her playful and uninhibited nature was soon recognized. When the police closed the theater, she asked a spiritualist friend for a spell that might bring her a new job. "It was my first experience with witchcraft," Sprinkle recalls, "and I didn't really expect it to work. But did it ever! I hit the jackpot. Maybe it was just good luck, but a week later I was working as a prostitute." She was discovered by porn producers soon afterward and went on to make over 200 hardcore films before leaving the industry to develop her own public performances, the most famous of which was her "Public Cervix Announcement," in which she allowed audience members to view her interior using a speculum and a flashlight. Well-written, well-illustrated, and calmly outrageous, Post-Porn Modernist is a great introduction to an American original. --Regina Marler [...] - Bad Girls and Sick Boys - Linda Kaufmann [1 book, Amazon US]
Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us. Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.
[Introduced me to Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Introduction" and having a picture with James Woods having his hand in his belly in Cronenberg's Videodrome, this book proves to be an easy read too. Recommended.