Song of Masking Myself, 46

Evoking the image of the beaked plague doctors of mediaeval Europe, Shane Neilson proposes that the wearing of masks in public always includes a measure of anxiety or even fear.2 Before COVID, I suffered six to seven minor colds a year. Since wearing surgical masks at work every day, I have never fallen ill. Neilson follows Ulrich Beck’s (1992) critique of ‘the cosmetics of risk’, a policy attitude which prioritizes only a theatre of mitigation and avoidance at the expense of seeking deeper resolution of impending problems.3 Before COVID, risk was in the sky, the air, the ground. While this must be studied empirically, and therefore remains beyond the scope of this article, the prevalent use of medical facemasks in the context of Covid-19 might indeed exacerbate rather than alleviate the fear of getting sick or even dying.7 Alone, in my office, I sometimes don a mask just to honor my love, to ritualize the reality that COVID is always present, never gone;it is no memory. In addition to the general hardships imposed by living during pandemic conditions, I was subject to a great deal of online harassment due to an innocuous article I published in 2016 about surgical masks functioning as affect-laden symbols titled “The Surgical Mask is a Bad Fit for Risk Reduction.”

The politics of the surgical mask: Challenging the biomedical episteme during a pandemic.

COVID-19 has seen politicians use a selective 'science' to justify restrictions on mobility and association, to mandate the wearing of face masks, and to close public infrastructure. There seems to be no role for health humanities scholars as yet, but perhaps there should be. This paper considers the fate of a health humanities article on surgical mask use that was published in a biomedical journal in 2016. This article, which did not operate from within the biomedical episteme but which was in conversation with the episteme, was misappropriated on both sides of the political spectrum to justify personal beliefs around mask use in the pandemic. This mistaken misappropriation is not only evidence of the utility of the common ground shared between biomedicine and the health humanities, it is also evidence of the possibilities inherent in a future interdisciplinary involving biomedicine and the health humanities.