You gaze at a face. Something is missing – the eyes are closed, the mouth is covered, the nose has ended up in the barber’s bread. This issue of Semiotic Review works to uncover semiotic ideologies of the face by analyzing what happens when people obscure, strip away, omit or overlook features. Reckoning the significance of faces, real and represented, requires a range of approaches, including those from scholars of art, media, anthropology, and face-to-face interaction. In this issue, contributors will interrogate what happens when a face – or part of it – goes absent, whether through masks or screens, erasure or enclosure. We examine faces as ideas and as technologies, as sites of sociality and of self-fashioning.  

Like all thematic issues, this issue will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is thus no deadline for submission.

[Image credit to Justin Barker]