Semiotic Review 7: Blank Faces | article published September 2019 |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71743/xsfcfc25 | Copyright © 2019 Meghanne Barker CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Blank Faces: Introduction to the Special Issue
Meghanne Barker
meghanne.barker@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract: The purpose of this special issue is to explore other means and results of making faces blank. We first explored these questions with a panel on the semiotics of “Blank Faces” at the 2016 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which included contributions from Silvio, Nozawa, and others. In exploring the blank face, we aim to illuminate the expectations that people have for their own faces or the ones they meet, even if those expectations so frequently fall short of the demands placed on them. This special issue includes original research articles on topics such as the editing of portraits for match-making purposes (Alpert), the range of human capacities to recognize and remember faces (Pearl), the alignment of human faces with characterological types (Occhi), and the proliferation of a face in urban landscapes to the effect that she is seemingly ubiquitous, and yet never meeting the viewer’s gaze (Manning). As such, this issue is concerned with the relationship between the face as a locus of interaction in everyday life and the face as an image that lends itself to typification, along with the layered processes of semiosis and the social relationships produced through encounters with faces.
Keywords: face; erasure; mask; animation; projection
“The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the Identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.” (Levinas and Lingis 1969:194)
“A study that takes the face as its subject resembles a butterfly hunt and must often be content with duplicates or derivatives, which divulge very little information about the life and secret of the face.” (Belting 2017:7)
“The human face is, already, a moving image.” (Steimatsky 2017:1)
It is not clear what the face is, what it does, or what it is supposed to do. In the difficulties the face presents, as a center of questions – surrounding subjectivity, perception, and signification — the notion of blankness becomes useful. The power of the face and the difficulty of locating this power result in actors obscuring, erasing, or omitting the face, in part or in whole. The face’s expressive capacity creates manifold possibilities for its failure or refusal to signify. At the same time, an expressionless face can elicit passionate responses, under the right circumstances.
This special issue on Blank Faces originally arose from the observation that scholars of animation had noted as significant the omission or hiding of part of a face. However, separate cases had different goals and produced contrasting effects: animators employ simplified faces — such as Hello Kitty, who is missing a mouth — in order to invite viewers to project expressions onto the face they were viewing (Silvio 2010; Yano 2013), whereas acts of facial covering can serve, instead, to block interaction (Nozawa 2013). In the former case, viewers project onto the blank space of the face, thus becoming participants in animating the character (Silvio 2010:431). Here, blankness invites the viewer, through acts of imagination, to engage with the character. On the other hand, Nozawa describes “effacement-work” in contrast to Erving Goffman’s “face-work” (Goffman 1982): “rather than acts of disclosure and relations of identity, [effacement-work] emphasizes acts of opacity and relations of layering” (2013:para. 40). Nozawa examines, specifically, the effacement-work of voice actors, who effectively “do the voice” of a character, not by “getting into” the character, but through acts of disembodiment that enable the layering of signs (ibid.; see also Nozawa 2016). Characterization involves processes of emptying and detachment in order to comprise the resultant character. Nozawa, along with Gretchen Pfeil, have described effacement in everyday, would-be-face-to-face encounters, as well, as techniques for blocking channels, for avoiding the face-to-face, through avoidance or through masking.1
The purpose of this special issue is to explore other means and results of making faces blank. We first explored these questions with a panel on the semiotics of “Blank Faces” at the 2016 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which included contributions from Silvio, Nozawa, and others. Nozawa built on his work on effacement in everyday interactions on the streets of Tokyo, between restaurant patrons and workers and among patrons themselves, among other examples. For Nozawa, effacement-work involves not just a turning away, as voice actors sometimes do, but instead makes use of various strategies of design: restaurants set up screens to partition patrons from one another. Such design elements offer a means for blocking phaticity (Jakobson 1960), so that closing off a channel protects one from face-to-face interactions. Nonetheless, such screens might also invite patrons to imagine one another behind the screen, so that they don’t necessarily foreclose the projection Silvio has described. Krisztina Fehérváry used the notion of blankness to consider unmarked aspects of faces that get naturalized in particular cultural and classed contexts, but which require a great deal of effort – and money – to achieve. In her examination between relationships between teeth and class, she argued that orthodontics produce an evenly-spaced smile so ubiquitous that it has become the expected form of middle-class mouths, both in the US and, increasingly, in postsocialist Hungary. Silvio explored the various uses of blankness on the pages of graphic novelists from Taiwan and Singapore. Even in animation, blankness does not do only one thing. I examined the fixed face of the puppet, and the techniques puppeteers and viewers employ in order to generate a multiplicity of expressions (or projections) onto the faces of these animated objects. Paul Manning traced the mysterious face of the Khevsur Girl on the urban landscape of Tbilisi, and her appearance in late Soviet Georgian films, as an emblem of a kind of local exoticism. Once associated at once with antiquity and modernity, later denigrated as part of a Soviet-era kitsch, the girl, with her enormous, downcast eyes, became a marker of unattainable beauty (See Manning, this issue, for an elaboration of this work).
Whether the face was obscured completely or simply turned away, the various notions of the “blank face” provoked this exploration of the many ways that face falls short from being considered really complete. In exploring the blank face, we aim to illuminate the expectations that people have for their own faces or the ones they meet, even if those expectations so frequently fall short of the demands placed on them. This special issue includes original research articles on topics such as the editing of portraits for match-making purposes (Alpert), the range of human capacities to recognize and remember faces (Pearl), the alignment of human faces with characterological types (Occhi), and the proliferation of a face in urban landscapes to the effect that she is seemingly ubiquitous, and yet never meeting the viewer’s gaze (Manning). As such, this issue is concerned with the relationship between the face as a locus of interaction in everyday life and the face as an image that lends itself to typification, along with the layered processes of semiosis and the social relationships produced through encounters with faces. What we have found, in surveying literature on faces and in looking especially for considerations of lack therein, is that there are many blank faces, and they do many different things. The vast literature on faces is a topic as rich and unstable as the face itself. The face seems to do so many things – sensing and signifying – showing and hiding – that by reading to the end of certain descriptions of it, it seems to be everything and nothing. It is our hope that, by looking at what happens when the face fails to be fully a face, we can trace specific work that the face does, and the effects it has.
Emptying the Face
I begin with the colloquial phrase of one having a “blank face” or staring “blank-faced,” as an example of a face in which nothing, technically, is missing from the features of the face. Eyes, nose, and mouth are all present and accounted for. Nonetheless, the viewer finds some expression missing from it, to the degree that this face gets described as “blank.” “Blankness” does not necessarily lead to an interpretation that the lack of expression indexes a lack of inner emotion. It has long been used to describe the opposite, to describe a face overcome with emotion. In the earliest noted use of the adjective “blank-faced” (by the Oxford English Dictionary), the narrator of George Meredith’s poem “King Harald’s Trance” (1887) describes the king as “blank-faced” as he races home to his unfaithful wife.2 Here, the blankness of the face conceals extreme emotion. In the next stanza, as he prepares to cleave his wife into two, it is as if a chain reaction passes through parts of his face and body:
Smell of brine his nostrils filled with might:
Nostrils quickened eyelids, eyelids hand:
Hand for sword at right
Groped, the great haft spanned. (Meredith 1923:256)
Then he slays her. The blank face of the king preparing to kill is not a permanent trait, but a temporary condition of the King, as passion possesses his entire being, setting off a chain reaction moving from his face to his hand.
In other cases, one might describe a particular face as being inherently blank or empty, such as when a face is particularly beautiful. In his essay on Greta Garbo, Siegfried Kracauer contemplates the actress’s beauty as so perfect as to render it impersonal. He describes the effects of such a face: “One possibility is that it represents a state of utter emptiness. That is, it is completely conceivable that the beauty lacking in all characteristic features represents a being without content and that the harmony is but a mask behind which nothing hides. Beauty and stupidity often accompany one another” (Kracauer 2016:144). Luckily for Garbo, her beauty is otherwise — it “derives from abundance and displays a full nature” (ibid.). Nonetheless, Kracauer returns to a notion of lack later in the essay, describing Garbo’s “lack of in-between” because of the purity of her portrayal (146). In this way, fullness and lack go hand-in-hand.
Faces, full as they are of features that both perceive and express, are often accused of lying or of betraying one’s lie. They hold together antitheses. The Gorgo – the mask of the gorgon, a face that is “first and foremost” a mask (Vernant and Frontisi-Ducroux 1988) – brings together opposites to an extreme, however. The monstrous face-mask of the Gorgo contrasts with the human face to the extent that it becomes the face of radical otherness: “Masculine and feminine, young and old, beautiful and ugly, human and animal, celestial and infernal, upper and lower…inside and outside” (Vernant, Zeitlin, and Collection 1991:137). The face of the Gorgo certainly contains features that contrast starkly with human faces, with its features resembling, according to Vernant, male and female sexual organs – thus it brings together upper and lower, inside and outside. It would also seem that this bringing together of so many antitheses is the opposite of a blank face. As a face monstrous and grotesque, yet somehow attractive (Vernant and Frontisi-Ducroux 1988), it is not lacking, but is rather excessive in a way that is overpowering.
Yet, precisely because the Gorgo’s face is too much, the mortal who gazes upon it loses their own face, as it is turned to stone, the stone becoming a mirror that at once allows the Gorgo to see her own face and uncovers the reality of yours: “To express this reciprocity, this strangely unequal symmetry of man and god, in other terms, what the mask of Gorgo lets you see, when you are bewitched by it, is yourself, yourself in a world beyond, the head clothed in night, the masked face of the invisible that, in the eye of Gorgo, is revealed as the truth about your own face” (1991:138). The meeting of gazes between the human face and that of the Gorgo is both revelatory and destructive. This meeting of gazes is, moreover, inevitable, due to the frontality of Gorgo, for even when legs and body are depicted in profile, the face is turned toward the viewer (Vernant and Frontisi-Ducroux 1988). See also Manning, this issue.
The face marks a point of tension between humanity and inhumanity, for Deleuze and Guattari, in their writing on faciality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Faces are not given, in their account, but are, rather, the product of facialization, a process of separating it from the rest of the body, which Deleuze and Guattari see as having a “multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code.” (1987:170). Through facialization, particular parts become, instead, decoded and overcoded “by something we shall call the Face” (ibid.). Once this part of the body becomes facialized, it forms part of a “surface-holes, holey surface, system” (ibid.). The face is a screen, a surface that at once receives and offers signification, while these black holes suggest subjectivity. Presence and absence sit in tension here, as the face is a surface and a map, “by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom” (ibid.:171).
The face is not only surface and holes, of course. People read marks on the surface — wrinkles, freckles, coloration, or hair — as indexes to life history, age, experience, racialized background (see Gigerenzer’s review essay, this issue), and gendered identity. As Simmel notes:
In the face [unlike the body], the emotions typical of the individual—hate or timorousness, a gentle smile or a restless espying of advantage, and innumerable others—leave lasting traces. In the face alone, emotion first expressed in movement is deposited as the expression of permanent character. By virtue of this singular malleability, only the face becomes the geometrical locus, as it were, of the inner personality, to the degree that it is perceptible. (1959:279)
The contours of the face speak to these concerns, as well, as noted by Plemons (2017) regarding facial feminization surgery (see Adair’s review, this issue). Doctors work with patients to ensure that one’s hairline and the shape of one’s jaw match the gendered identity of the patient so that her inner traits (femininity) will be recognized by those who meet her face. As Plemons has also noted, doctors often treat facial feminization surgery as a process of subtraction – of removing features that have made a face more masculine in order to return it to a pre-adolescent (and thus more feminine) ideal; this process often also includes efforts to make the face look younger, along with removing or reducing features that make the face more “ethnic” (less white), as well (Plemons 2019). Plastic surgery can be one way of erasing certain traces, while it also makes others legible – in the case of Plemons’ informants, it ensures that the face you regard is recognized as belonging to a woman.
In addition to these more stable characteristics of faces, whether the product of genes, experience, or conscious interventions, faces constantly contort themselves in myriad positions, as we talk and listen, breathe, eat, and drink. The “neutral” face is hardly a default, and it depends not only on features of the face itself at rest in order to be perceived as lacking expression. The particular context in which a face appears, along with more general cultural expectations, can shape whether viewers perceive a face as neutral or not. The resting face becomes subtly charged with feeling as soon as it becomes juxtaposed with phenomena that suggest an affective reaction, according to the “Kuleshov Effect.” Early Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiments on the effects of montage consisted of viewers first being shown the resting face of an actor, this image followed by various phenomena that the actor was, presumably, viewing: a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, or a child (The original footage has been lost; some claim it was a naked woman on a sofa) (Prince and Hensley 1992). According to accounts of these experiments, viewers interpreted the resting face of the actor as charged with emotions that depended on the image that came after. The face looking at the soup, for example, looked hungry to the viewers. This experiment has been influential especially for film theorists on the importance of montage (Yampolsky and Taylor 1996; Pudovkin 2015; Prince and Hensley 1992). It has also inspired work by psychologists interested in the effects of context on the reading of facial expression (Calbi et al. 2019).
In writings on the Kuleshov experiment, the presumed “neutrality” of the face (prior to the montage) seems to go unquestioned. Not everyone perceives everyone else as having a neutral face, however, even when that face isn’t doing anything. The phrase “resting bitch face” (RBF) already implies a gendered bias, so that a face’s perceived neutrality or lack thereof is also influenced by expectations regarding how a woman’s or man’s face should look when at rest. A recent study in social psychology (Hester 2018) offers an example of using the phenomenon of perceiving someone as having a perceived resting negative emotion (PRNE) as a key to understanding gendered biases themselves, rather than assuming there is anything inherently negative about such faces. That is to say, they studied the perception of these faces, rather than the faces themselves. In popular press, though many note the sexism inherent in discourses surrounding RBF (e.g., Grossman 2019), others take for granted that RBF is a phenomenon that inheres in the faces themselves, confidently declaring that there’s a science behind it (e.g., Gallagher 2016), even if the studies cited also find strong gender bias in their results.3 Despite the fact that attribution of negativity would seem to lie in the (sexist) eye of the beholder, FaceReader and Noldus Information Technology have developed software, based on research by Paul Ekman and colleagues, to analyze automatically faces and “measure” their RBF.4 Noldus Consulting is run by Jason Rogers, an oft-cited source of the studies proving the “science” behind RBF. Those citing him include mainstream news sources, such as CNN,5 and sites targeting readers who think they might “have” RBF, and who are thus happy to offer tips or sell products to help you eliminate it.6 Thus, while the “science” behind the phenomenon is certainly suspect on multiple grounds, a discourse swells around it and gives rise to an invitation – or even an injunction – to identify and address the resting face’s non-neutrality. Whether writers insist that it is the responsibility of the viewer to overcome sexist biases against certain faces or put the onus on the face-holder to remove traces of contempt in order to avoid negative treatment, the failure of certain faces to achieve neutrality when at rest becomes a problem of discussion and intervention.
This is all to say, the blank face is not an empty face. Not all faces are interpreted as neutral, and neutrality is not a state that the person possessing the face allows or even achieves. It is something the viewer grants to the face. It depends not only on the images that appear before, after, or next to the face, but rather on a lifetime of viewing and interacting with faces. These faces we encounter in our lives are, more often than not, anchored to bodies. We interact with these faces, with these bodies, and thus build associations between faces we meet and others we have known, seen, trusted, disliked, or lost.
Masking the Face
Masks cover faces, represent faces, and layer representations of animals, of spirits, or of other humans over the face. Covering (rather than modifying) part or all of the face can block channels of contact, whether by inhibiting eye contact, blocking smells from entering, or blocking speech. They might hide part of the face made of skin, while also embellishing, elaborating, or transforming. The mask can offer the viewer less face and more face at the same time. In Mauss’s essay on categories of role, person, and self, he notes the historical and etymological link between the persona and the mask (1985[1938]). In the Latin ritual he links to this etymological root (along with Etruscan), the mask determines or defines the persona enacted. More recently, Belting (2017) argues that face and mask, as objects of historical inquiry, must be studied together, the boundaries between them blurry at best, each sharing certain features of the other, as both social and individual, fixed and changing:
In life, expressions change the face we have into the face we make. This dynamic triggers a perpetuum mobile of many faces, which may all be understood as masks once we expand our concept of the mask. The concept of ‘the face as a mask’ is ambiguous in this sense because it is not merely a face that resembles a mask but also a face that creates its own masks when we react to, or engage with, other faces. (2017:17)
In conceiving of changing facial expressions as a “perpetuum mobile,” one’s face not only moves but transforms into a different face with each expression. Each change in expression involves taking off one mask to put on another. This expanded conception of the mask — of the face as a mask — recalls early twentieth-century Russian theater and film theorists’ preoccupation with finding and categorizing the angles of the face (see Lemon 2014 on Meyerhold) or of combinations of gaze and expression that would produce a range of expressions for stage or screen as a kind of anthropology of the actor (Yampolsky 1991).
While, to Belting and to Meyerhold, the face is a mask, Levi-Strauss claims the reverse: the mask is the face. Examining masks and paintings on faces, he argues that, “In native thought…the design is the face, or rather it creates it. It is the design which confers upon the face its social existence, its human dignity, its spiritual significance” (1963: 259). Levi-Strauss, in this essay, connects a split representation on the surface of faces (through masks or painting) with a fundamental split, or duality, of the face, as biological and social, which then predestines the face for decoration, thus endowing it with its “social dignity and mystical significance” (261). In this way, the naked face is not entirely whole, so that covering it, through mask or paint, does not hide the face, as much as it completes it.
Alongside, or in spite of, these various attributions of the mask as defining, co-constituting, or completing the face, there are also various examples of masks or other facial coverings as designed to hide or deceive. Masks offer a useful plot device, helping to hide one truth about a person (while perhaps letting the deceived party really “see” or hear another aspect of them). Shakespeare makes use of masks in various plays – in Much Ado About Nothing and in Romeo and Juliet, for example, as a common technique of disguise (Shakespeare 1997). It needn’t be a mask, per se, however: the male heroes in Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte manage to trick their fiancées simply by donning mustaches and claiming to be Albanian (Mozart 1993). People might cover all or part of their face in order to avoid specific types or technologies of recognition. In response to increasing use of facial recognition technologies, new technologies of evasion emerge. One website, an “open source toolkit,” offers tips for creating an “anti-face.” Using hair and makeup styling, they promise to make faces undetectable to facial recognition software.7 A research team has developed special glasses frames that offer opportunities both for dodging one’s own facial algorithm and for impersonating others (Sharif et al. 2016).
People might cover parts of their faces for a variety of reasons — sartorial, political, religious — and yet have little control over how others interpret what is being covered or why. As a child, a mother of a schoolmate sometimes wore large, dark sunglasses. When seen like this, rumors circulated in speculation of what she was hiding underneath. Whether used as a celebrity disguise, to hide bloodshot eyes, or to conceal the fact that one is sleeping in class (as my grandfather claimed to do as a college student), sunglasses, like masks, not only hide the face but transform it — while also, of course, transforming what one sees from behind the shades. A commodity that emerged in the twentieth century, sunglasses are, according to fashion historian Vanessa Brown, inextricably tied to discourses of modernity, projecting qualities — of coolness, of glamour, for example — while also hiding and concealing (Brown 2014).
Veils present, perhaps, one of the most politically-charged practices of covering part or all of the face. Mired, for some time now, in Orientalizing discourses regarding the oppression of the veiled Muslim woman in contradistinction to the liberated Western one, Islamic feminist and anthropological writers have, for decades already, offered pointed critiques surrounding such facile distinctions (Hirschmann 1997). Veils needn’t necessarily signal oppression: by making a woman “invisible,” they can enable a woman to enter male spaces, whereas men have no comparable option enabling their entry into female-only spaces (Ahmed 1982; Meneley 2007). The “portable seclusion” of the burqa (Papanek 1971) can offer women the opportunity to move outside the home while signaling “belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount” (Abu‐Lughod 2002:785). Veils are not exclusive to Islam, either, of course, as pointed out by Jennifer Heath, in her introduction to a volume bringing together women reflecting on veiling from a variety of practices (Heath 2008). In her own chapter in the volume, Heath argues for thinking about veils alongside masks as creating a kind of theater (ibid.). Just as with masks, veils may be less about hiding than they are about showing.
Defacement
In examining the various ways in which something is found to be missing or lacking in the face, there is a persistent tension between such alterations as at once hiding and showing — between closing off one way of interacting while simultaneously inviting another. For Georg Simmel, the face is a feat the mind accomplishes in creating a sense of unity from disparate parts (1959). Due, in part, to the role of symmetry in the composition of the face, it is extremely sensitive to minute changes: “The face, in fact, accomplishes more completely than anything else the task of creating a maximum change of total expression by a minimal change in detail.” (Simmel 1959: 280). Perhaps it is because of our extreme sensitivity to small changes in the face that makes larger ones all the more profound. What happens, then, when a face disappears altogether?
Before considering the face that gets erased or covered entirely, we might break it up and consider the component parts and their disposability. While Simmel was concerned with the unity with which the mind endows the face, acts of covering, masking, or defacing often take away or obscure particular features while leaving others intact. Eyes and mouth have received the most attention here, perhaps because of an interest in eye contact and language as establishing self through other. As Levinas argues, “universality reigns as the presence of humanity in the eyes that look at me” (1969: 208-209). Being looked at marks a first signification that is part of considering language as a response to the speaking subject, an ethical act.
The nose might seem, in comparison with eyes and mouth, a rather superfluous feature to consider. However, the original abstract for the panel included a nod to the short story “The Nose,” by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (Gogol and Vasilevich 1999 [1835]), in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to find his nose has gone missing. While the aesthetics of cuteness, of which Hello Kitty serves as emblem, inspired considerations of the power of projection in animating the cute face, here the grotesque takes over, a seemingly antithetical aesthetic tendency which nonetheless shares features with cuteness, particularly regarding a tendency toward exaggeration (Ngai 2005). Nabokov argues that Gogol’s own large nose makes it unlikely that the troublesome facial feature detached from its face represents another bodily organ (Nabokov 1961). Throughout the story, the protagonist chases his nose, tracks it down, struggles to find a way to put it back on, and ultimately gives up. In Gogol’s story, the nose takes on the characteristics of the person. The piece of the thing that was supposed to make up the person becomes a person in its own right, violently disrupting the personhood of its owner. Then one morning, without explanation, the nose resumes its position in the middle of the face. Even the narrator admits the whole story is absurd, but then argues that so many things are.
That such a humble feature as the nose can cause so much trouble again reminds us of the power of the face. Goffman described the face as “sacred,” and his essay on “face-work” describes the many ways in which we work to preserve our own — and one another’s faces from the risk that facing one another inevitably presents (1982). In examining a few of the innumerable ways in which the face gets damaged, covered up, or wiped away, we can also bear witness to the many ways people work to protect or restore their own faces and the faces of others. When Gogol’s hero finds his nose restored, it seems, he appreciates the feature as he never had before.
Conclusion
It is my hope that in this brief introduction, I have laid out a glimpse of the heterogeneity of forms and techniques in which the face becomes perceived as blank. I do this not in order to offer a comprehensive taxonomy of all of the types of blank faces that exist. Rather, with the other editors, we invite scholars to continue to interrogate moments when the face is perceived as missing something. We encourage considering such moments as entry points into understanding aesthetic regimes, relationships of power, or anxieties surrounding intimacy or its impossibility. We call on you to consider the notion of the blank face as a provocation to explore tensions between the face’s ability to reveal and to conceal. We welcome you to find traces, to locate erasures, or to declare a frustrating opacity in the visage of others.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Perry Sherouse for fruitful conversations and recommendations regarding the approach to this introduction, for sharing citations, and for offering feedback on early drafts. I offer many thanks to Paul Manning for guidance on later drafts of the introduction. By collaborating with both, and with all of the contributors to this issue, I have benefited immensely as a scholar, and I appreciate everyone’s ideas, enthusiasm, and wisdom surrounding the semiotics of blank faces.
Endnotes
1 Pfeil and Nozawa presented on this work together in a paper entitled “Effacement-Work,” as part of a panel, “Defamiliarizing Communication by Familiarizing the Channel: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Cybernetics and Actor-Network Theory,” at the Annual Meetings of the AAA in 2015.↩
2 “Blank,” adj. and adv., OED online (2019).↩
3 https://theweek.com/articles/815496/insidious-sexism-resting-bitch-face https://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/culture/scientists-discover-cause-of-resting-bitch-face-5971, Last accessed May 26, 2019.
4 https://www.testrbf.com/ Last accessed May 26, 2019.↩
5 https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/03/health/resting-bitch-face-research-irpt/index.html Last accessed May 26, 2019.↩
6 https://www.scienceofpeople.com/science-resting-bitch-face/, Last accessed May 26, 2019.↩
7 See https://cvdazzle.com/, Last accessed March 19, 2019. .↩
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