ABSTRACT
Our individuality is often seen as symbolised by the face. We recognise people by their facial features: most of us can immediately identify someone we know by their face, and the documents that we carry bear our picture so that officials we encounter can compare the person in front of them with the image to validate our identity. This chapter begins by discussing a novel and a video performance that pose the problem of facelessness, and see the face literally and metaphorically as a mask that can or cannot be removed. It explores face transplants, and in particular the first face transplant, where the recipient was a Frenchwoman named Isabelle Dinoire. The portrayal of Dinoire reinforced the idea that, to be a whole, separate individual, a person has to have a face that is intact. Face transplants are based on that logic. However, Dinoire's own thoughts about what she experienced, which the author discusses, appear to challenge this reasoning.
