Faciality is a social production which is not limited to the literal physical face, yet is concerned with making legible the face, the body, the landscape. The face is a text. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality. Not only, then, is the face subsumable within social categories but faciality is simultaneously constitutive of those very categories. Faciality is that both on which and by which subjectivity is written.
Faces conform to, resonate within, a dominant lexicon of possible subject positions.
The face will tell. And if she is something else entirely, the social process of facialization will capture her in one aspect of a categorical binary or its other. Faciality presupposes an exchange, a face and a gazer, and thus takes place in a social, public space. While Deleuze and Guattari use faciality to name a social identification and subjectification that washes over the entire body and more in the interests of legibility, I want to explore how the literal faces of eighteenth-century women get caught up in facialities that position their bodies.