Gender, Mask and the Face: Towards a Corporeal Ethics

Abstract

The processes of revealing and concealing gender are easily taken for granted as a simple matter of considering something as being either exposed or covered up such that it might at times be more visible and at other times less visible. Here, revelation is associated with the uncovering of something that exists beneath that which is over it. The very idea of the revealing and concealing of gender already implies the donning or removal of a mask. To reveal — quite literally to lower or remove the veil that masks the face — is to show the face so that its bearer can be seen without obscurity or adornment. Such a consideration of gender as something subject to potential revelation suggests a performance where gender can be surfaced and hidden, highlighted and suppressed, overt and covert, processual and fixed. Countering such a view, this chapter argues that rather being something that might be concealed or revealed (i.e. through the donning or removal of a mask) gender is itself a mask. Here gender is not something that can be revealed so as to be known, but is that which does the concealing. On this basis we ask our central question: what lies beneath when the gendered mask is removed?

It is like us, but it responds with strangeness because it is not like us [...] The mask stands in an intermediary position between different worlds. Its embodiment of the fragile, dividing line between concealment and revelation, truth and artifice, natural and supernatural, life and death is a potent source of the mask’s metaphysical power (Tseëlon, 2001: 20, italics added).