This book is also available in German. When the human gaze falls on a body, it constructs and deconstructs it. The setting for this is our daily life in all its different shapes and forms. The human body functions here as a semiotic system, an archive, a fiction, a projection screen, or an alphabet. The gaze that encounters it may manifest as an anta­gonist—be it incisive or flawed—yet it can itself disappear from view. The texts and images brought together in this volume seek to remove the body from the firing line and away from these judging and derogatory glances. They act as mirrors redirecting looks, points of view, and ideas to enable us to understand implicit and explicit processes of reading.