Artificial Skin and Biopolitical Masks, or How to Deal with Face-Habits

Abstract

Building on the case study of the performative practice of voguing within ballroom culture among LGBTQIA+ communities, the aim of this article is to recognize a facial agency capable of putting into tension three thresholds of meaning: visibility and invisibility; identity and otherness; nature and artifice. On the basis of these tensions, interpretive habits concerning identity are incorporated into the face as a semiotic dispositif that negotiate sociocultural expectations and limitations. These habits, when agentively performed through the face, give shape to a communicative project that manipulates platforms of identity into biopolitical masks. The analysis will also give an account of how “worn” biopolitical masks reproduce and perform a facial monstrum, or warning, and how this specification warns others of the normativity of aesthetic and biopolitical appearance while activating an intentional transformation of identity.