Semiotics Of Identity Research Articles

“To mask, or not to mask, that is the question”: COVID (Anti)Masking and Comics

ABSTRACT While masks have functioned as important cultural artifacts, religious symbols, costume pieces, and components of social identity throughout history, in the current biopsychosocial context (of the COVID-19 pandemic), they predominantly refer to medical masks. This article, after reviewing the comprehensive and complex history (and evolution) of masks, seeks to investigate the symbolism and attitudes toward masking in the wake of COVID-19 through a detailed analysis of single-paneled images and sequential comics by artists such as Michael Green, Clare McCarthy, and illustrator Isabel Seliger (for NPR), who delineates the experiences of Agnes Boisvert, an ICU nurse. The article relates the issue of masking with the semiotics of identity, anonymity, responses of healthcare professionals, collective responsibility, and anti-masking attitudes, among others. This research further draws attention to the potential of the comics medium in visualizing and expressing sentiments around (anti)masking and concludes by showing how biological, cultural, political, and social forces inform and influence discourses around masking.

Semiotics of Identity: Politics and Education

In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive “production” of identity in political and educational practices. I use the conceptions of both Laclau and Eco to elucidate the operation of this structure, and illustrate it with an example of the emergence of the “Solidarnośc” movement in Poland, expanding its analysis provided by Laclau. I focus on the moment when one of particular demands assumes the representation of totality, which, in Laclau, is left to “circumstantial” determination. This moment inspires several questions and needs to be given special attention if Laclau’s theory is to be used in theory of education. It is so because theory of education cannot remain on the level of the ontological (which is the core of Laclau’s achievement), but has to theorize “non-ontological” dimensions as well, that is the ontic (i.e. “content” of education), the deontic (duty, obligation, and the normative in general), as well as what I call the deontological—the very relation between “what there is” and “what there is not” (including that which should be) as the locus of education.

Masks and the Semiotics of Identity

Anthropological approaches to masks and masking typically consider the meaning and symbolism of masks, and the social functions of masking ritual. This article considers how masks are able to perform such work, through a semiotic perspective that treats masks as icons and indexes of identity. Such a framework also broadens the category of 'mask' to include other signalling systems which may be called upon by the semiotics of identity in any particular culture, expanding the traditional and stereotypical conception of the mask. The relationship between masking and identity, and variability in the form of masks, are illustrated through ethnographic examples from the Kwakiutl of the northwest coast of North America, and the Kulina Indians of western Brazil.