Introduction - Masks and Faces: Critical Perspectives Across Disciplines

This introduction examines the historical, philosophical, and cultural entanglement of masks and faces, challenging their traditional opposition by arguing for their mutual constitution. Tracing their conceptual genealogy from ancient notions of prosopon to modern philosophical debates, the text explores how faces function as expressive and ethical surfaces while masks operate as transformative devices that mediate identity, visibility, and social interaction. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the introduction presents masks and faces as co-constitutive surfaces shaped by cultural practices, technological developments, and power structures. It outlines the volume’s contributions, which analyze masking across literature, cinema, political theory, anthropology, cognitive science, digital culture, and semiotics, addressing topics such as racial classification, biometric surveillance, prosthetics, pandemic masking, AI-generated faces, and interspecies performance. Ultimately, the introduction proposes that masking is not merely concealment but a dynamic process that structures subjectivity, perception, and recognition, especially in contemporary digital environments where distinctions between face and mask, reality and simulation, increasingly blur.