The Woman on Water: Masking and Veiling in Eighteenth-Century Venice

This book explores the semiotics of masking and costuming and their relations to women’s social mobility within spaces which could both allow and inhibit women’s self and sexual expression. I suggest that the carnival and the street—at times inextricably linked—create an arena in which identities are contested and reconfigured while ultimately reinstating hierarchical or at least categorised norms. I also ask: to what extent do masking and veiling practices permit women a degree of freedom from the strictures of status and sex and how is identity brought into question through facial and bodily concealment?