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ABSTRACT Scarlett Johansson has described as futile her fight against a swell of deepfake porn images featuring herself—especially because they can be produced by almost anyone with free algorithmic software available online and with access to one or more images of her face. However, in this essay we maintain that within contemporary technocratic culture, the mediated star image of ‘ScarJo' always already reveals the complex convergence of both bios (life as qualified or narrated, qua bio-graphical life) and zoë (bare life, or the life of the cellular organism) with technos (technological life and/or life skills). This convergence of Scarlett Johansson as celebrity (bios), as human being (zoë) and as technological entity (technos) is consciously explored in, and thus can be amplified via, deepfake videos made using her image. We suggest that this is especially the case because in their efforts of ‘(con)trolling’ her celebrity image (which is a 'con' image that is also a form of trolling), these deepfakes express patriarchy's attempts to frame a threatening and oozing femininity, while also masking deeper issues of race.
Brown et al. (Thu,) studied this question.