The Semiotics of the Face in Digital Dating: A Research Direction

The article investigates the socio-cultural meaning of the face in relation to its natural and biological features, focusing on the particular domain of mating habits. After surveying the role of the ‘face’ in the sexual behaviors of several non-human animals, and especially of primates, the article ponders on the crucial role that the face plays in the seductive discourse which precedes and accompany mating in all human cultures and also in many primates’ behaviors. It, then, deals with the transformation that these seductive patterns of signification and communication undergo in the passage from face-to-face intercourse to digital dating. Here, the gap between the necessarily realistic representation of one’s bodily face and the idealized version of it allowed by digital picture editing widens, to the point that new epistemic parameters start to circulate throughout the digital semiosphere.