Deepfake pornography as a male gaze on fan culture
It addresses the gendered dynamics in fan communities, highlighting a shift from female-dominated textual fanfiction to male-dominated visual forms like deepfake pornography.
This essay examines how deepfake technology has enabled male audiences to create and share deepfake pornography, linking it to fan culture and participatory media.
This essay shows the impact of deepfake technology on fan culture. The innovative technology provided the male audience with an instrument to express its ideas and plots. Which subsequently led to the rise of deepfake pornography. It is often seen as a part of celebrity studies; however, the essay shows that it could also be considered a type of fanfic and a product of participatory culture, sharing community origin, exploitation by commercial companies and deep sexualisation. These two branches of fanfic evolution can be connected via the genre of machinima pornography. Textual fanfics are mainly created by females for females, depicting males; otherwise, deepfake pornography and machinima are made by males and for males targeting females.