“Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. Self-presentation is an aspect of embodied subjectivity that manifests not only through conscious strategies of appearance management, but also through implicit processes of the body schema, such as habituated modes of bodily comportment. Self-presentation serves an important role in the social realm in that it ensures that one presents a coherent public image, where appearance and behaviour are predictable and intelligible over time and across various contexts. In this presentation I will begin by looking at the social theory of Erving Goffman with respect to impression management to outline the significance of self-presentation within intersubjective and social relations. I will then discuss the phenomenology of self presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Husserl regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations. Particular attention will be paid to Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, regarding the reversibility of ‘the see-er’ and ‘the seen’, and Donald Landes’s recent commentary on this work with respect to ‘reading’ the other. I will argue that the capacity to engage successfully in self-presentation is not only a fundamental part of embodied subjective experience, but also has ontological significance.”