The Semiotics of the Medical Face Mask: East and West

Abstract

After a concise survey of the state of the art on the semiotics of the mask and on studies in humanities and social sciences about medical face masks, the essay provides anecdotic evidence about differences in the semiotics of medical face masks in Europe and in the ‘Far East’, especially Japan, China, and Korea; it proposes a semiotic grid for decoding the phenomenology and meaning of the medical face mask; it concludes with some general observations on the change of the meaning of the face during the current pandemic.