Prior to the pandemic, masks and masquerades have served as cultural expressions that can protect a subject (Matuschek, et al, 2020), who might adopt them because of a perception that his/her/their identity is at risk either politically or socially (Castle, 1986). They are historically common to seasonal and religious festivals, ceremonies and rituals of initiation or death, carnival festivals and balls, and military pageants (Sylvester, 2015). In fact, Joan de Riviere (1999) argues that the masquerade produces new identities, new configurations of gender. Judith Butler’s seminal theory of performativity (1988, 1990, 2011) expands on this to suggest the transformative character of masquerade disrupts necessarily a reified sense of gender identity (Patel, 2013; Bell, 2014). Thus across cultures and disciplines, the mask and masquerade signify both exposure and (dis)simulation. While they have historically enacted foundational performances of identity, their aspirational encouragement has also been mediated at times, by a necessary disingenuousness. These two competing aspects of mask and masquerade produce a tension between possibility and determination that characterizes much of pre-pandemic thinking about masks and masquerade in the West.

However, in the era of pandemic, masks have gained a signification freighted by the fear of contagion: “the novel and unpleasant feeling of being vulnerable to the invisible threat of the infection (i.e., to be the ones in danger) or to be contagious themselves (i.e., to be the danger)” (Martinelli, et al, 2021; Lupton, 2021). In a recent study aggregating perceptions on the mask globally and across cultures, the mask has become a political statement in the West: its public adoption an act of resistance to Trumpism (Martinelli, 4). Now read as a prophylactic, a sign establishing a boundary between the safety of the self, the promotion of continued survival, it suggests itself as a countersign to the recklessness of individuals who choose to abandon it For many faculty in higher education, the mask alludes to the risk still persistent in their classrooms and campuses (Alexander and Tureen, 2022; Pettit, August 25, 2021, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2021).

It has also underscored global inequities even as it has promoted the image of social responsibility. In Ukraine, ppe, often manufactured abroad and prohibitively expensive in stores, was unavailable to most families. In this case, the mask signified personal privilege, wealth, and an identification with the West (Martinelli, 6). In Hungary, similarly, masking becomes a sign of the rich; its absence underscores one’s lower social status. In Norway, citizens were encouraged to do without masks in order that healthcare professionals might have them (Martinelli, 7). Our three papers explore aspects of the cultural experience of “the mask” in this post-pandemic moment, the politics of masking and unmasking in three different regional settings, to ask how the mask has altered a specific social setting, repositioned aesthetic experience around this newly-valenced sign.

In "Masking as Unveiling Identity," Spurlin repositions Assia Djebar’s examination of the veil as a polyvalent symbol, a visible border of spatial separation between the sexes, and the public/private. The paper examines how the historical precedent of Djebar’s analysis of the veil has enabled Algerian writer, Nina Bouraoui, to rethink the mask in relation to le monde blanc of the lesbian subculture in Paris in order to discuss the suppression of her Algerian heritage: in order to unmask sexual difference, Bouraoui must adopt the mask of whiteness.

In "Masks off. New Modes of Living Together," Gil argues that an unexceptional icon has come to define our novel mode of living together: the ordinary mask has become the medium of a global politics of exception. A frontier, the mask sets the boundaries to perceived identity. Thus it connotes an ontology. From Barthes through Levinas, the presentation analyzes the ontology of masks in relation to our contemporary condition. In addition, it discusses how the mask mandate questions, subverts or underwrites late modernity’s total visibility mantra and resists the surveillance capitalism project.

Finally, Professor Millet's “The Sentiment of the Mask and how the Study of Literature has changed because of it," asks how the mask has become a sign of self protection, changing the notion of social interaction in recent literature. She links the current sentiment of masking to an obscure Jewish sect in the eighteenth-century, recently the subject of Olga Tokarczuk's Books of Jacob. Looking at the sect's belief in disguising their identities as a sign of redemption, Millet rethinks Tokarczuk's novel, the pandemic mask, around the idea of literary transformation.