On Niqabs and Surgical Masks: a Trajectory of Covered Faces

The face is pivotal in our cultural practices and language, as well as a central topic of debate in the realm of society: the early 2010s were marked by a diatribe around Islamic facial covering, both in Arabo-Persian countries and in the West and, today, the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemics all over the globe brought another facial supplement to the discussion — the surgical mask. Niqabs and surgical masks have more in common than their function of covering the face: they are united by their image of Otherness, related to Middle- and Far-Asian countries, but also to a project of transcendence of our natural condition. Saniotis (2012) analyses the mat- ter of Transhumanism and Islam as problems of body techniques which, like the two systems, meet at their roots: our analysis adds to his investigation by examining face veiling and facial covering as transhuman praxes, both concerning the discursive and narrative levels of the Greimasian theory reaching beyond their cultural meanings, while also debating the matters of Otherness and Alterity emerging from those supplements, utilising the socio-semiotic works of Oliveira and Landowski as our framework of analysis. The article reflects on the manners in which both objects, the niqab and the surgical mask, operate through similar enunciative mechanisms and construct similar narrative utterances; nevertheless, culture invests polemic contracts in these objects, creating a ‘false binary’ system around them, which is largely emerging from their plastic configuration. Through our analysis, a series of ‘false binaries’ — such as religion and technology — are explored with the goal of reflecting on the assimilation and rejection of cultural customs and the manners in which the many goals of transcendence, divine or scientific, are centred around the control of the bodies and the emergence of authoritative orders that fix subjects in thematic roles.