The Mask of Universality: Politics in the Pandemic Response

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2022

2020 may well become known as the year of the mask, harkening to an omnipresent threat of molecular contagion and trans-corporeal intermingling. This article traces the ways in which bodies materially relate and co-constituted one another over the course of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Highlighting the role of a virus in reshaping human social interaction and "self"presentation, "everyday performance" with face-masks is posited as a way of simultaneously altering material processes of contagion while making perceptible the ethical relations and commitments that shape these processes.

global-e, 2020

COVID-19: A war of masks?, 2021

Discussions and politics regarding COVID-19 have to consider the major question of the chronic emergency caused by the environmental crisis. Governments try to balance economic factors and socially preoccupied population class politics on the international level. Populist opponents, demonstrating in the street, tend to nationalize the question, taking a problematic, highly individualistic approach. This crisis has to be considered as a revolutionary opportunity to change social and environmental relations and prevent social Darwinism.

Open Anthropological Research

We provide an introduction to this special issue on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting some of the key findings and central arguments of the articles collected herein, and discussing their significance in relation to the broader political context of the pandemic. We address the roles of necropolitics and “necrosecurity”, pointing to their relationships to colonial and eugenicist histories, as well as some of the ways in which a globally-ascendant authoritarian populism contributed to the often-disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic. We consider how unequal structures of social and public obligation were reproduced to the detriment of lives and livelihoods, and the challenges facing institutions of protection, care, and social reproduction. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which the pandemic may have opened up avenues for more systemic transformations—for good or for ill.

GAPAC Papers, 2020

Considering the current pandemic as an expression of the environmental variable, it seems that we are now barely short of the military to complete the picture of a globalized crisis that is taking down on regimes and societies across the orb. Contagion and despotism reinforce each other, based on manipulation, fear and uncertainty

Puncta Special Issue, 2022

I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.-bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice" 1 I. MOTIVATIONS AND CONCERNS As the lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in, academics in the humanities and social sciences quickly began interpreting and making sense of this period of transition, uncertainty, and cascading crises (Baraitser and Salisbury 2020; Bambra, Lynch, and Smith 2021; Bratton 2021). However, since the very early days of the pandemic, some commentators sought, and indeed continue to seek, pathways to our so-called "normal" pre-pandemic lives. Much of this commentary has failed to acknowledge the burden of the pre-pandemic status quo for many marginalized people, as well as foreclosing space

Global Perspectives, 2020

The outbreak of Covid-19 prompted the greatest political intervention in our lifetime. Governments around the world introduced measures that shattered our private life, brought economic life to a virtual standstill, and threw into question the value of international organizations. The article first shows how the political interventions undertaken throughout 2020 have crushed long standing equilibria on such fundamental issues as the notion of a common good, the limits of individual freedom, or the relationship between the state and markets. It then analyses the battle of power and minds between the main political protagonists. The following section scrutinizes the policies applied by these actors, and their implications for democracy. The final section tries to envisage a democratic politics suitable for the world of viruses, super-bugs, climate change, poverty and hyper-connectivity.

Law, Culture and The Humanities, 2020

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we very often heard the expression "We are at war," but the warlike tactics that appeared more visibly during the pandemic have been long before used and deployed against the most precarious bodies among us (Butler). In fact, the "danger" constituted by the narrative of fighting the pandemic served in imposing security apparatus and exceptional measures, as well as deepening the "structural reforms" that neoliberal governments consider as their sole task to carry out (Federici). Thus, the rhetorical resource of the pandemic danger gave legitimacy to the expansion of warlike strategies with the complacency of the whole population. In the present paper, drawing on an analysis of what we consider to be the main neoliberal governmental strategies in the way of dealing with the pandemic, we question the logic of a "total continuous war" (Foucault), carried out in particular through different bodies hierarchization and the designs of post-pandemic societies. This reflection has been developed in three steps: first, we question what is this war that the COVID-19 pandemic made more visible. In a second part, we observe government tactics and its relation with the rhetoric of war, which allows neoliberal governments to expose differently the human bodies (Agamben). Finally, we examine the relation between bio-necro-policies and the urgency of promoting a total continuous war that opposes disposable bodies to lives that neoliberal governments seek to protect.

2023

Masks are an important part of human life in pandemic society, but in addition to their medical uses, masks have also begun to show different roles in today's epidemic situation. This article will start with the pandemic and masks, then discuss whether we are entering the post-pandemic era or whether the pandemic routine is becoming daily routine. Finally, this article discusses the power exercise of masks from a visual analysis.

2020