Porn Studies

ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20

Reading out of context: pornographic deepfakes,

celebrity and intimacy

Milena Popova

To cite this article: Milena Popova (2019): Reading out of context: pornographic deepfakes,
celebrity and intimacy, Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2019.1675090

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2019.1675090

Published online: 12 Dec 2019.

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PORN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2019.1675090

Reading out of context: pornographic deepfakes, celebrity

and intimacy
Milena Popova
Rogue scholar, Bath, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this article I bring together perspectives from porn studies, Received 28 December 2018
celebrity studies and fan studies to bear on the issue of Accepted 10 September 2019
pornographic deepfakes. I identify two key questions that the
KEYWORDS
literature from these areas leads to with regards to deepfakes: to Deepfakes; celebrity;
what extent are they a form of audience engagement with intimacy; authenticity;
celebrity that seeks to access a private, intimate or authentic pornography
person behind the star image; and to what extent are deepfakes
created for circulation and enjoyment within a small community
of practice as opposed to being intended for release to the
general public? By comparing deepfakes to other types of
sexualized audience engagements with celebrity, I show that they
exhibit little concern with intimacy and the private, authentic
person behind the star image, and that they are created and
circulated within small communities of practice, who put effort
into contextualizing and containing them in those spaces. As a
result, I argue that the reading of deepfakes suggested by the
celebrity studies paradigm of intimacy and authenticity is
insufficient, and that further work is needed to understand the
kinds of meanings those who create, share and enjoy deepfakes
make with them.

Introduction
Deepfakes came to the attention of the general public in early 2018, when social news
aggregator site Reddit and pornography hosting site PornHub announced they were
banning deepfakes content from their platforms (Hern 2018; Robertson 2018). Deepfakes
had emerged only shortly before then with the release of FakeApp, a relatively user-
friendly piece of software that allows users to merge material from different videos; for
instance, superimposing one person’s face onto video of another. While deepfakes have
been used for political parody (Zucconi 2018) and concerns have been raised about the
technology’s ability to create relatively convincing fake news footage (Schwartz 2018),
the use that has attracted the most media attention has been superimposing the faces
of women celebrities onto pornographic videos. As a result, sites like Reddit and
PornHub have grouped deepfakes together with revenge pornography under the
heading of ‘non-consensual pornography’ and made efforts to ban them, and the

CONTACT Milena Popova [email protected]

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. POPOVA

communities who create, share and enjoy this material have moved to other, more niche,
platforms.
Partly due to the recent nature of this phenomenon, deepfakes in general have to date
predominantly received scholarly attention in artificial intelligence research (Kim et al.
2018) and in areas such as law and political science, which are concerned with the ‘fake
news’ potential of the technology (Chesney and Citron 2019). Pornographic deepfakes,
in particular, have not yet been investigated from a cultural studies perspective. In this
article, then, I bring together perspectives from porn studies, celebrity studies and fan
studies to bear on the issue of pornographic deepfakes. I identify two key questions
that the literature from these areas leads to with regards to deepfakes: to what extent
are they a form of audience engagement with celebrity that seeks to access a private, inti-
mate or authentic person behind the star image; and to what extent are deepfakes created
for circulation and enjoyment within a small community of practice as opposed to being
intended for release to the general public? I consider deepfakes within a wider context of
what I call sexualized audience engagements with celebrity: audience-generated material
about or featuring celebrities that is not authorized, and that is explicitly sexual in nature. I
consider audiences’ intertextual reading and meaning-making practices, as well as the
practices and paratexts the material is embedded in to answer the two questions identi-
fied. Specifically, I use secondary literature and my own past original research to compare
deepfakes to three other types of sexualized audience engagements with celebrity: nude
hacks (private, intimate images of celebrities obtained illicitly and shared beyond their
original intended audience); Real Person(a) Fiction (RPF – a subset of fanfiction, frequently
erotic, that fictionalizes celebrities); and slash manips (still images created through digitally
combining pornographic images with celebrity faces, created in communities that overlap
with or are adjacent to RPF and wider fanfiction spaces). I show that unlike most of these
other types of engagements, deepfakes show little concern with intimacy and the private,
authentic person behind the star image, and that they are created and circulated within
small communities of practice, who put effort into contextualizing and containing them
in those spaces. As a result, I argue that the reading of deepfakes suggested by the celeb-
rity studies paradigm of intimacy and authenticity is insufficient, and that further work is
needed to understand the kinds of meanings that those who create, share and enjoy
deepfakes make with them.

Intimate, authentic celebrity

There is a tension in the literature on celebrity and audiences’ engagement with it
between viewing the celebrity purely as text, on the one hand, and viewing them as a
private person ‘behind’ the public image that the audience strives to see past, on the
other. Dyer’s (2006) concept of the star image suggests a purely or predominantly
textual approach to celebrity. The star image is made up from textual artefacts available
to the audience: official materials such as public performances; unofficial material
ranging from journalistic reporting to gossip; and, more recently, material that blurs this
boundary, such as celebrities’ interactions on social media. Other commentators,
however, argue that the audience’s fascination with celebrity is frequently based on the
tension between that star image and an imagined private, authentic self. It is this quest
for authenticity that drives much of audiences’ engagement with celebrities. Marshall
 PORN STUDIES 3

(2006) argues that this search for authenticity has in part been encouraged by celebrities
themselves as a result of changes to media landscapes and the economics of celebrity. In
this new environment, celebrities rely on disclosures hinting at a private, authentic person
behind the star image to generate publicity for their work. Such disclosures may be more
or less managed, ranging from carefully manufactured ‘scandal’ to paparazzi images in
gossip magazines (Holmes 2005). This dynamic adds a new layer between the textual con-
struction that is the star image and the unknowable-to-most private individual. Van den
Bulck and Claessens (2013, 47) call this the ‘official private persona’.
This emphasis on intimacy and authenticity of celebrity can also be found in
approaches to celebrities’ sexualized performances and audience engagements with
them. Lawson (2015), for instance, reflects on the implications of an incident in 2014 in
which private, nude or otherwise sexualized images of mostly women celebrities were illi-
citly obtained from their private cloud storage accounts and released online. She positions
the hack as an extension of audiences’ desire to see behind the celebrity persona and gain
access to a more authentic person, more specifically ‘the authentic sexual woman’ (2015,
607). She points out a number of similarities and differences between the hacked celebrity
nudes and amateur pornography: the domestic feel of the images gives the viewer a sense
of intimacy and authenticity, of looking into someone’s private life rather than at a pro-
fessional porn performer, but, unlike in amateur pornography, the subject here is not an
everyday, ordinary person. The public exposure of these private images, and the non-con-
sensual nature of it, suggests that the viewer is getting a glimpse at the real, private person
behind the star image. Yelin (2018) also draws this connection between exposure, implied
or real non-consent and intimacy and authenticity in her analysis of Lady Gaga’s author-
ized book of ‘behind-the-scenes’ photographs Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson. She shows
how it, too, plays with ideas of intimacy, privacy and authenticity. Yelin argues that the
presentation of the book suggests that the images were the result of an absence of bound-
aries between photographer and subject. They hint at an at least potentially forced
exposure, at photographs taken in the grey area of consent, and so suggest that the
viewer is looking at Gaga the vulnerable, private person, not Gaga the professional perfor-
mer and celebrity.
Beyond material produced by celebrities (officially or otherwise), digital technology and
new media also allow audiences to more easily put the celebrity image to work for their
own purposes and circulate such reworkings (Marshall 2006; Kanai 2015; Vares and
Jackson 2015). Such reworkings may be seen as relatively harmless, such as .gif reaction
images using footage of the celebrity, or they may be regarded with more suspicion,
such as pornographic deepfakes. The sexual and non-consensual nature of deepfakes in
particular appears to be driving a reading of them within the intimacy and authenticity
paradigm of celebrity studies. As a result, they are positioned as inherently concerned
with the private person behind the star image and, more specifically, as a violation of
that private person. Yet to what extent audiences’ reworkings of the celebrity are con-
cerned with authenticity and the private person (official or otherwise) behind the star
image arguably varies between different audience practices. While the celebrity relation-
ship with media seems to assume that audiences crave authenticity, there are forms of
engagement with celebrity that do not appear to care one way or another, or even
reject the idea outright. While individual celebrities may still legitimately perceive such
engagements as a violation, this question is beyond the scope of this article, and my
4 M. POPOVA

interest lies instead in what meanings the communities who create, share and enjoy deep-
fakes make with them.
Hayward and Rahn (2015) classify different kinds of celebrity sex tapes in the context of
personal sex video production, and amateur and mainstream pornography, and focus on
issues of pleasure, consent and consequences for the participants. Most relevantly to the
issues of intimacy, authenticity and deepfakes, Hayward and Rahn consider pornographic
celebrity look-alike videos as a subset of the celebrity sex tape genre. While they concede
that such videos are produced for a range of purposes, the authors give them the unex-
amined blanket label of ‘parody’, a word also sometimes associated with deepfakes
(Zucconi 2018), perhaps because of the free speech protections afforded to parody in
US law (Liebler 2015). They argue that because celebrity look-alike pornography does
not use the celebrity’s actual body, consent is not a relevant consideration, but do
suggest that there are ethical issues involved in spectatorship and distribution similar to
those that apply to revenge pornography. Hayward and Rahn note that celebrity look-
alike pornography is frequently positioned as extending the celebrity’s previous, author-
ized sexualized performances. They argue that, like revenge pornography, some celebrity
look-alike pornography can be seen as an attack particularly on women celebrities’ partici-
pation in public spaces. Yet this ostensible attempt to keep women in the private sphere is
arguably different to attempts to access the private person behind the star image that
phenomena such as nude hacks suggest, as it lacks both the intimacy suggested by
private images and the authenticity of those images.
So while approaches to (sexual) celebrity are frequently concerned with issues of inti-
macy and authenticity, there are clearly other forms of engagement with celebrity. Deep-
fakes can be seen as another development in a long lineage of sexualized engagements
with celebrity and star image – both consensual and non-consensual – including various
forms of sex tapes (Hayward and Rahn 2015) and nude hacks (Lawson 2015). Notably,
deepfakes are generated not by celebrities themselves, and arguably not even by com-
mercial producers (unlike look-alike porn videos), but by audiences. A key question
about deepfakes then becomes this: to what extent is this a form of celebrity engagement
that seeks to give an impression of and is read as unrestricted access to the authentic, inti-
mate, private person behind that star image? I seek to address this question by proposing
a category of material I call ‘sexualized audience engagements with celebrity’; that is,
material which is sexually explicit, focused on celebrities and generated (in a broad
sense) by audiences. I compare deepfakes to a range of other such sexualized audience
engagements with celebrity, including nude hacks, RPF and slash manips. Like deepfakes,
the latter two of these, in particular, are practised within relatively self-contained commu-
nities and, as I discuss in the following, have developed representational conventions and
modes of reading and interpretation not necessarily accessible outside those commu-
nities. From this discussion, a secondary, related question arises about the target audience
of deepfakes: to what extent are they a form of engagement with celebrity that is (delib-
erately) contained within a relatively small community of practice as opposed to some-
thing that is intended for the general public? I answer this by examining community
practices and paratexts that deepfakes are embedded in, to argue that this is a relatively
small and self-contained community, and that therefore further and different types of
research is needed to truly understand the meanings and pleasures derived by this com-
munity from the material they create and share.
 PORN STUDIES 5

Methodology
The primary data for this research come from two popular deepfakes sites: the dedicated
site mrdeepfakes.com and the voat.co ‘subverse’ v/DeepFake. Both sites were established
as a result of discussion platform Reddit banning the original forum where the deepfakes
community formed, r/DeepFakes (landoflobsters 2018; Robertson 2018). voat.co is a
Reddit-like platform, which advertises itself as friendlier to ‘free speech’ and prides itself
on hosting content and discussions that Reddit bans and avoids, including racist, misogy-
nistic, homophobic and transphobic content (Poletti 2015; Pullen 2015).
It is useful to understand the key features of the two sites, as technical affordances have
both shaped the content and communities they host and the way this research has been
conducted. voat.co offers a very similar feature set to Reddit, including discussion boards
(subverses, as opposed to Reddit’s subreddits) separated by topic, threaded discussion
and an upvote/downvote mechanic. The site does not offer its own video hosting, so
users who produce deepfakes and share them on voat.co have to find alternative
hosting solutions. While in the early days of deepfakes many users were able to host
their content on mainstream porn sites like PornHub, this has become more difficult as
PornHub, similarly to Reddit, has banned deepfakes content under the category of invo-
luntary pornography (Hern 2018). As a result, voat.co users appear to be hosting their
video content mainly on amateur pornography website erome.com. mrdeepfakes.com,
on the other hand, is a standalone platform dedicated entirely to deepfakes, including
video hosting, categorization options, a ‘community’ section where users’ profiles can
be viewed and a discussion forum. The site also offers extensive tagging and search func-
tions, allowing users to tag the featured celebrity, optionally the porn performer, and to
add other tags such as ‘masturbation’, ‘anal’ or ‘buttplug’ which others can use to find
specific videos relevant to their interests. mrdeepfakes.com is funded primarily through
advertising for other porn sites. It also allows users the option to ‘donate’ to video creators
using bitcoin. The site bills itself as having ‘the largest fake celebrity porn selection’ (‘Com-
munity’, n.d.) and as a major creator of deepfakes, encouraging users to request videos
they would like to see. At the time of writing, mrdeepfakes.com hosts just around 2000
videos, with a handful of new videos being added daily. While it is more difficult to tell
how many videos are posted on voat.co, this number is likely to be smaller. Content is
also sometimes cross-posted between the two sites.
This research takes a digital or networked ethnographic approach (boyd 2008; Hine
2000, 2015), seeking entry points into the community being researched, following links
that present themselves to users, and acknowledging and leveraging the individualized
nature of online experiences. In addition to the content of the sites, I take into account
the technological affordances, site design and feature set as part of my data (Beaulieu
and Simakova 2006). Moreover, the relatively small number of videos on mrdeepfakes.com
allowed me to conduct a systematic review of certain aspects of the material, such as the
metadata and paratexts surrounding them, and this in turn drove decisions on which
content to engage with in more detail. As this research compares deepfakes to other
forms of sexualized audience engagements with celebrity, it is worth noting that my
engagement with these other types of material is a mix of primary and secondary research.
References to manips and celebrity nude hacks are based on secondary literature;
6 M. POPOVA

references to RPF are partially based on my own previous research into the subject
(Popova 2017) and partially on secondary literature.

Imagined intimacies
Given the contested nature of celebrity in our society, and interpretations of celebrities as
variously texts or people, a key question about deepfakes is this: to what extent is this a
form of celebrity engagement that seeks to give an impression of unrestricted access to
the authentic, intimate, private person behind that star image? To begin to answer this,
I propose viewing deepfakes within a wider context of what I call sexualized audience
engagements with celebrity. I compare deepfakes, and the intertextual resources those
who create, watch and circulate them bring to the material, to other such material, particu-
larly celebrity nude hacks, manips and RPF.
Celebrity nude hacks are perhaps the closest we get to seeing the genuine private
person behind the star image. While the images themselves are not generated by audi-
ences, the way they are obtained and circulated is through audience action. These
images are not intended to be accessible to the public, they are not part of a performance
of stardom or celebrity. They show a high degree of intimacy, and tend to be regarded
both by the public and the celebrity as authentic, and therefore as an invasion of
privacy. Lawson (2015) argues that audiences who choose to view these images rely on
their understanding of the celebrity’s public and official private persona, as well as their
own desire to gain access to the intimate, authentic, private person behind the star
image to make sense of such material.
Authenticity and intimacy have also been key concerns in academic approaches to RPF.
Readers and writers of RPF derive enjoyment from re-arranging the pieces of information
they have about a celebrity and their life in many different ways, creating many different,
sometimes contradictory, stories based around the same pieces of ‘canon’ information.
Busse (2006a) argues that, in this context, the authenticity of information about the celeb-
rity is not necessarily the primary factor in whether it will be considered for inclusion in
such stories. Rather, its fit with the community’s collectively constructed image of the
celebrity, one that Busse (2006b) notes is shaped to better meet participants’ interests
and desires, is the overriding criterion for whether the community will accept such infor-
mation. Yet even in RPF circles a concern with authenticity cannot be entirely dispensed
with, as becomes evident at points of crisis in fandom, such as when a celebrity is
embroiled in a scandal that fans deem too inappropriate to use as inspiration for fanfiction
(Popova 2017). As a result, the precise nature of RPF’s intertextual engagement with the
star image is contested even within the communities that produce RPF, with many fanfic-
tion readers and writers claiming that they ‘compartmentalize’ the fictionalized character
they create (who is largely based on the celebrity’s public and official private persona) and
the private person behind the star image. RPF, then, strikes an uneasy, frequently shifting
balance between striving for an authentic view of the private person behind the star
image and recognizing that any such view it purports to offer is clearly fictionalized. In
some ways, RPF’s textual nature allows it to do so with considerably more nuance than
the raw materials of deepfakes. Authors are free to write not only sex scenes but to
develop and explore characters and give their readers an insight into the imagined
inner lives of celebrities, while also clearly marking those as fictional and imagined.
 PORN STUDIES 7

Another type of sexualized engagement with celebrity that can be seen as related to
both RPF and deepfakes is slash manips. Slash manips are still images generated, like
deepfakes, through the use of image-manipulation software where a celebrity’s face has
been combined with a porn performer’s body to create an erotic or explicit image. Like
RPF, manips are a common fannish practice in communities that overlap with those pro-
ducing fanfiction. Such communities consist mostly of women and non-binary people and
the majority of their members identify as queer (centrumlumina 2013a, 2013b), although
as with fanfiction there are also men (anecdotal evidence suggests they are mostly non-
straight) who make manips (Brennan 2014a, 2014b, 2016). Manips frequently use the
faces of actors, but as Brennan (2014a) argues, they feature much more extensive
additional edits, ranging from the digital addition of clothes or the enlargement of
penises, to the addition of sweat or bruising on bodies to signify a range of emotions
and experiences, to significant changes to the background of the scene. These edits func-
tion to anchor slash manips in a fictional ‘canon’, allowing the viewer to place the scene as
portraying not the celebrity actors whose faces are used but rather the fictional characters
they play in a film or television series. This suggested interpretation may be enhanced by
paratexts or integration of additional texts, such as image titles using character rather
than celebrity names, and even the inclusion of short fiction alongside the images.
Brennan also notes that manip artists frequently strive to achieve a look that visually
echoes the originary fictional work that their creations are based on. In this way,
manips originating in fanfiction and adjacent communities offer perhaps the most
complex set of intertextual meaning-making resources when it comes to sexualized audi-
ence engagements with celebrity. Of course there is no guarantee that everyone viewing a
manip will read it in the same way, as representing the fictional character, either within the
community that creates and circulates manips or perhaps especially outside it. Nonethe-
less, manips offer multiple layers of possible interpretations based on intertextual
resources including the fictional characters, the celebrity and the representational conven-
tions of pornography.
Sexualized audience engagements with celebrity, then, are created and read within a
wider set of intertextual meaning-making resources, allowing for different kinds of
interpretations: an emphasis on intimacy and the private person behind the star image
in nude hacks; a clearly fictionalized private person in RPF; and a complex interplay
between celebrity, fictional character and pornography in slash manips. How, then, do
deepfakes resemble or differ from these other forms of engagement with celebrity?
Media commentators and hosting platforms have grouped deepfakes together with
celebrity nude hacks and revenge porn under the heading of ‘involuntary pornography’
(landoflobsters 2018; Robertson 2018). Yet deepfakes differ significantly from stolen inti-
mate images of celebrities produced by celebrities themselves for their own private use.
Rather than intimacy and authenticity, deepfakes focus purely on the sexual. They are
composed from images of the celebrity’s face harvested largely from public performances
such as interviews and other media appearances – that is, occasions where what is on
display is the star image, not the private person – and mainstream pornography videos
featuring porn performers who are deemed to be a good ‘match’ in terms of body type,
face shape and hair for the celebrity being faked. Hayward and Rahn (2015) argue that
mainstream pornography’s representational conventions differ significantly from those
of personal sex videos and amateur pornography, with amateur pornography creating
8 M. POPOVA

an impression of intimacy and closeness to the real life of the individuals filmed. The
relationship between amateur and commercial pornography is rather more complex
than that, as becomes clear, for instance, in Stella’s (2016) work. Stella shows how some
genres of commercial pornography, particularly gonzo porn, have adopted some rep-
resentational conventions from amateur pornography. Nonetheless, he argues, such
cross-contamination has limits in that certain authentic intimacy is difficult to re-enact
by professional performers on screen. It is this intimacy that distinguishes amateur porno-
graphy from more industrial productions, and, arguably, if deepfakes communities’
primary concern was with finding ways of representing an ‘authentic’ self behind the
star image, then amateur pornography would make an ideal source material. Yet that is
by and large not the subgenre of pornography which deepfakes use as a building
block. As a result, they rely heavily on the representational conventions and tropes of
mainstream pornography, including industrial gonzo porn. Many videos, for instance,
contain extended sequences where the performers’ faces are not seen and the focus is
instead on genitalia. They use mainstream pornography staples ranging from cum shots
and facials to double penetration and gangbangs. Others are shot from the male perfor-
mer’s point of view, allowing them to focus almost entirely on the female performer’s body
and actions. This is a far cry from other attempts to access the authentic private person
behind the celebrity, including hacked private images of the celebrity.
In comparison to RPF, too, deepfakes show significantly less focus on intimacy. While
fanfiction, including RPF, is frequently sexually explicit to the apparent exclusion of all
else, the textual nature of the medium as well as the representational conventions of
the genre allow incorporation of characterization and even plot development within sex
scenes (Driscoll 2006). In contrast, deepfakes focus entirely on visual sex scenes, to the
point where other material is frequently edited out from the source video. There is no
reference in deepfakes to events in the celebrity’s life (public or private), or their person-
ality. This, again, would suggest that they are by and large not an attempt to access an
intimate, private person behind the star image. There are clear comparisons to be made
between manips and deepfakes, too: both are visual, and both use images of celebrities
and porn performers as their building blocks. Yet there are also key differences. They
draw on significantly different intertextual resources for meaning-making and interpret-
ation. While a significant proportion of the edits that manips undergo is for the purpose
of suggesting the fictional character played by a celebrity in a film or television series,
deepfakes lack that potential fictional interpretational layer. At the same time, while deep-
fakes feature the celebrity’s face, most retain the original soundtrack of the porn video
they are based on, including the porn performer’s voice and accent as well as dialogue
typical of mainstream pornography. This adds a different potential interpretive layer to
the deepfake, one in which porn performer and celebrity become one, new, character
that is neither authentically the celebrity nor authentically the porn performer. Rather
than granting a look at the private person behind the star image, then, deepfakes take
the celebrity’s sexualized performances to the extreme and divorce them from ideas of
intimacy. This makes them markedly different to other forms of sexualized audience
engagements with celebrity, where intimacy and the humanization of the star, or the sug-
gestion of a well-developed fictional character with an inner life, are key. Rather than
seeking an intimate, human connection with the celebrity, deepfakes appear to reduce
 PORN STUDIES 9

them to only the sexual element of themselves and the sexualized elements of their
performance.

Escaping from context

Pornographies, including sexualized engagements with celebrity, tend to have their own
representational conventions. Particularly niche pornographies, such as queer and femin-
ist porn (Schorn 2012; Liberman 2015), are embedded in communities of practice who
produce, read or view and circulate the material, and are familiar with the representational
conventions and meaning-making practices around it. Yet in a world of social media, we
are also increasingly seeing such material or extracts from it shared beyond its original
context, for instance on ‘tube’ sites or (until recently) porn-friendly social networking
sites like Tumblr. Brennan (2018) highlights the risks of pornographies escaping their orig-
inal contexts and communities of practice. He recounts the example of a de-contextua-
lized clip from a fantasy ‘bareback sex addiction’ website being reposted to PornHub
and resulting in viewers speculating about the authenticity of the material. In their inves-
tigation of the creation, circulation of and meaning-making around porn gifs (short,
looping extracts from porn clips that are easily shareable on social media sites such as
Tumblr), Hester, Jones, and Taylor-Harman (2015) also showcase the range of new and
alternative meanings porn audiences can make with material that is taken out of its orig-
inal context. Such new meanings may be positive or negative depending on the exact
material, audience and context, but there is an added risk when it comes to de-contextua-
lizing sexualized engagements with celebrity: audiences who are not familiar with the
original material and its representational conventions may potentially interpret it as a
genuine and authentic depiction of the celebrity in question. This is also part of the
reason why commentators group deepfakes together with revenge pornography and
nude hacks into the category of ‘involuntary pornography’. It is therefore worth under-
standing how the communities that produce and circulate sexualized engagements
with celebrity relate to their material and its context. To what extent are efforts made
to contain the material within the community of practice, and conversely are there
attempts to bring it to the attention of the wider public and present it as authentic?
RPF and manips originating in fanfiction-adjacent communities have their own rep-
resentational conventions, which are understood and shared by the members of the com-
munities where these materials circulate. Such communities also have distinct norms and
practices for producing, sharing and enjoying the materials. RPF, for instance, is embedded
in wider fanfiction practices. These include tagging stories both to make them easily dis-
coverable on archives and to give the reader an idea of what to expect from the story.
Wider fanfiction paratextual practices also include titles, author’s notes and reader com-
ments that allow authors to claim ownership of the work within the murky copyright
regimes governing fanfiction (Tushnet 2007; Herzog 2012). While the risk of a written
work being mistaken as a factual account of real events is relatively low, RPF communities
have nonetheless established practices of including a disclaimer indicating that stories are
a work of fiction and do not purport to report real events in the lives of the celebrities who
serve as the basis for the stories. Some disclaimers are even phrased in ways that directly
address a celebrity or someone close to them who may have found the story: ‘If you got
here by googling your name or someone you know, please hit the back button now’ is a
10 M. POPOVA

popular phrasing for this sentiment. Communities that produce and share slash manips
also have practices and paratexts that identify these works as manips, and (as already dis-
cussed) draw in intertextual meaning-making resources from the fictional characters por-
trayed by the actors featured in them. Such practices and paratexts are a clear indication
that the primary target audience of these sexualized engagements with celebrity are the
communities that produce and circulate them in the first place – they are not intended for
general audiences who are unfamiliar with the representational conventions and practices
of the fan communities where these materials originate. This stands in stark contrast to
materials such as celebrity nude hacks. Such images are deliberately taken from their orig-
inal, private, context and published in ways intended to make them go viral and gain the
greatest exposure possible among the general public (Lawson 2015). So where fan com-
munities who create RPF and manips have practices and processes in place to limit distri-
bution of the material outside the community and to provide context for it, those
engaging in the distribution of hacked intimate celebrity images actively work towards
de-contextualizing the images and making them available to audiences outside their orig-
inal target. This raises the question of where on this spectrum of creating and containing
the material, on the one hand, to distributing it to the widest possible audience, on the
other, deepfakes sit.
It is worth at this point investigating the practices of deepfakes creators and those who
view and share this material in order to gain a better understanding of community norms.
There are some interesting differences between the two deepfakes communities exam-
ined in this study, driven in part by technological considerations and in part by community
attitudes. As previously discussed, mrdeepfakes.com offers its own video hosting, meaning
that the vast majority of video content produced by that community is also hosted on the
site, with no involvement from external platforms. As a result, content on the site is clearly
contextualized and marked as not real footage in a number of ways. The URL and site logo
and banner all feature the word ‘deepfakes’. Similarly to fanfiction in fan community
spaces, individual videos are embedded in a set of paratexts that function both to
make them discoverable on the site but also to give context and additional information
to viewers. They include tags describing the sex acts featured in the video, but also tags
for the celebrity whose face is used and, in about a quarter of the videos, tags for the
porn performer featured (either as a separate tag or in the author’s notes field). This
draws the viewer’s attention to the fact that they are not watching the actual celebrity
but a partially computer-generated image made up of visual artefacts of both the celebrity
and the porn performer. Another important indicator of the ‘fake’ nature of the material is
frequently embedded in the video itself, as some prolific deepfakes creators (including the
owner of the mrdeepfakes.com site) include a logo or watermark in their work which fea-
tures the word ‘fake’. This may function as a way of claiming authorship of the work, like
author’s notes in fanfiction (Herzog 2012), but has the additional effect of clearly marking
the material as not actual footage of the celebrity, even if it is shared outside its original
context. Thus, material on mrdeepfakes.com is clearly contextualized and marked as ‘fake’
both through the paratexts around it and, in many cases, through visual elements included
in the videos themselves.
The v/DeepFake subverse on voat.co presents a slightly different technical and social
environment for the community residing there. As voat.co is not a site dedicated to deep-
fakes but rather a discussion forum platform hosting forums on many different topics, it
 PORN STUDIES 11

offers neither the in-house video hosting capabilities of mrdeepfakes.com nor many of the
tagging, sorting and search functionalities. There is therefore less of a rigid structure for
the provision of paratexts: the user is not prompted by the technical interface to
include tags for the celebrity, porn performer or sex acts featured in the clip. Conversely,
this means that users are free to include or not include contextualizing information in
other ways; for instance, in the post title or as text included in the post. Some users do
this, using the post title and text to convey information similar to that carried by the
tags on mrdeepfakes.com. This can include the celebrity name, the sex acts featured or
technical information about the video such as length or whether it contains sound.
There are notably two different styles of post title on voat.co’s v/DeepFake subverse:
one which contains the celebrity name and sex acts featured in the video (for instance,
‘Taylor Swift – Stepdaughter Sex-Ed [Innocent, POV, HJ, Cowgirl] (14 Minutes)’), and one
which clearly marks the content of the post as a fake (for instance, ‘Not Emma Watson
3 – Longer Vid w/ Sound’). Even within the relatively closed community of voat.co
users, then, some deepfakes creators clearly mark their videos as fake in the way they
present them. The fact that voat.co users’ videos are hosted on external platforms adds
another dimension to the question of paratexts and contextualization. The majority of
deepfakes creators on voat.co use amateur porn site erome.com for their video hosting.
erome.com offers very limited interaction capabilities and almost no space to provide
context beyond the video title. Additionally, as the voat.co community’s main interaction
space is on voat.co itself, there is little incentive for users to also include extensive para-
texts on erome.com. It is therefore technically possible for erome.com users to stumble
upon deepfakes videos with very little context, and in fact at the time of writing a deep-
fakes video was featured under the ‘most popular’ section on the erome.com front page. It
is notable, then, that the practice of clearly marking the video as a fake in the title is more
widespread on erome.com than on voat.co. Video titles on erome.com are generally more
in line with the ‘Not Emma Watson’ style (as was the case with the one featured on the
front page), in contrast to many of the post titles on voat.co itself which lead with the
celebrity name. The difference between titles used on voat.co and those on the hosting
platform suggests that creators of deepfakes distinguish between the relatively closed
community of practice that is the v/DeepFake subverse and the relatively open environ-
ment that is erome.com, and seek to contextualize the material in spaces where it
could more easily be encountered by accident and taken out of context.
Like fanfiction and manip communities, then, and unlike individuals who distribute
celebrity nude hacks, deepfakes communities across both sites examined in this research
appear to be finding ways of contextualizing the material they create as ‘fake’; that is, not a
factual representation of the celebrity they are engaging with. Additionally, where a higher
risk exists of the material spreading beyond the community of practice, such as with
videos hosted on erome.com, an effort is made to limit such spread or to at the very
least retain some context. While some of these practices may be a way of claiming own-
ership of the work and building sub-cultural capital (Thornton 1996), the fact that contex-
tualizing practices differ between the community’s main interaction platforms and the
video hosting site suggests that efforts to contain the material within the community of
practice are deliberate. Broadly speaking, then, this is a community that does not seek
the widest possible, de-contextualized exposure for its creations (unlike those who
release celebrity nude hacks), but rather seeks relatively private pleasures shared only
12 M. POPOVA

with those who have a similar understanding of the material. This, together with the fact
that the intimacy and authenticity paradigm offered by celebrity studies does not appear
to explain what meanings deepfakes communities make with the material they create and
share, indicates that different approaches with a focus on insider interpretations are
needed to really understand deepfakes.

Towards context
As deepfakes communities are relatively small and self-contained, not seeking more
general exposure for their creations, outsider readings of pornographic deepfakes lack
the necessary context to understand the kinds of meanings made with this material.
Yet gaining that context has also proved remarkably difficult. Here, I would like to offer
some observations and speculation that may guide future work.
One common approach in digital ethnography involves examining and perhaps parti-
cipating in the online interactions of the community one is studying: comment exchanges
and other kinds of conversations, for instance. Yet neither the users of voat.co nor those of
mrdeepfakes.com appear to produce a significant number of comments or in-depth con-
versations. The most commented-on videos on mrdeepfakes.com have fewer than 30
comments. Interaction between creators and viewers, or even just between viewers, is
rare, and comments are generally standalone responses to the video. Two categories of
comments stand out: requests for more work by the creator, either featuring the same
celebrity or for videos of a different celebrity; and commentary (both positive and nega-
tive) on the creator’s technical capabilities and the technical qualities of the video. A sig-
nificant subset of the former category are comments requesting deepfakes of Bollywood
or K-Pop stars. Comments acknowledging that the material is erotic or arousing are
notable in their rarity, particularly in comparison to some of the other sexualized engage-
ments with celebrity covered in this article, such as RPF or manips. The small amount of
data available here makes it difficult to draw any robust conclusions, but the structure
of the comments that are available raises questions about the performance of masculinity
in these spaces, and the prevalence of requests for deepfakes of Bollywood and K-Pop
stars adds a raced dimension to these questions.
Deepfakes communities’ lack of concern with intimacy and authenticity also highlights
the articulation of the sexual and the intimate both in media coverage of this material and
in the authenticity paradigm of celebrity studies: there is an assumption underlying these
discourses that sexualized engagements with celebrity are also necessarily intimate
engagements with celebrity. Yet rather than the intimate, authentic, sexual celebrity,
perhaps the closest we can get to an outsider understanding of what deepfakes offer is
the amalgamation of porn star and celebrity. The superimposition of faces, bodies,
voices and dialogue flattens two people, two performances, into one. The final result,
rather than intimate or personal, is a simulacrum of both sex and celebrity.

Conclusion
Outsider readings of deepfakes broadly sit within the celebrity studies paradigm of
attempts to access the authentic, private person behind the star image. Yet neither the
intertextual resources used in the creation and reading of deepfakes nor the community’s
 PORN STUDIES 13

practices of containing and contextualizing the content support this interpretation. Com-
paring deepfakes to other sexualized audience engagements with celebrity, such as slash
manips, RPF and nude hacks, shows that deepfakes communities are much less concerned
with issues of intimacy and authenticity of the private person behind the star image than
other communities producing such sexualized engagements. Intertextual resources that
other communities use to suggest different, more intimate interpretations of the material,
such as visual and textual elements that suggest characterization and humanization of the
star and paratexts that situate the material in an intimate context, are largely absent from
deepfakes. Instead, deepfakes build predominantly on mainstream pornography, includ-
ing commercial gonzo porn, rather than other genres that would be able to convey
more intimacy. Additionally, examining the practices and paratexts around the creation
and circulation of deepfakes shows that deepfakes communities are making significant
efforts to contextualize the material and contain it within their community of practice
rather than release it to wider audiences. Material is clearly marked as fake in paratexts,
especially on sites with a less specialized audience, and many of the videos themselves
feature watermarks indicating that they are deepfakes, thus making it harder for them
to be misinterpreted as authentic celebrity sex tapes. Deepfakes, then, are created by a
small community of practice for circulation within that community, and outsider readings
of the material lack the necessary context to make sense of it.
There is significant additional work needed to understand what meanings deepfakes
communities do make with this material. Inquiries into the structure of the communities
that form around deepfakes, how they perform their own identity within the community,
the impact of being forced to move to increasingly niche platforms and their interactions
with other communities on those platforms would also be of interest. There are also sig-
nificant challenges to this: the relatively small communities and niche platforms, but also
the communities’ relatively low interactivity, limit the usefulness of digital ethnography
methods. Users’ anonymity and pseudonymity also make it difficult to follow connections
across sites and platforms and to understand what other networks deepfakes community
members may be part of. At the same time, community members are also likely to be
reluctant to participate in interview-based research. Yet to understand the work deepfakes
do and the communities that form around them, a reading in context is essential.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Milena Popova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5827-8270

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