Masked States and the "Screen" Between Security and Disability

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4949366
AutoresMel Y Chen (autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen40
Número1-2
Páginas76-96
Fecha de publicación2012-03-01
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWomen's studies quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0732-1562 • E-ISSN: 1934-1520
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/wsq.2012.0004
OpenAlexW2060940807
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas15

I open with a typical poster from a hospital emergency room that advises on contingent measures taken to prevent spread of H1N1, showing calm, gently smiling eyes behind a biological secured around a blue surgical cap (fig. l). The poster reassures us - acknowledging that sight of a could be frightening - that masks, benevolently, not threateningly (you may see others ... it does not mean that someone has swine flu), protect everyone. Such evocation of all possible parties does not at first seem a standard security apparatus, but in fact its language mimics all-embracing appeal of your slogans found today in many security genres, from extraordinary extensions of airport search techniques to digital passcode access. This mask, when worn in health or medical contexts, is urged as necessary protection from transmission of disease, while other masks are coded as threat - for instance, facial coverings that occlude individual features potentially thwart facial-recognition surveillance software. Masks can, in these versions, render face unmappable to security operations of vulnerable state. In light of heightened contagion scares in contemporary United States, we might consider medicalized as a newer prosthetic form in light of concurrence of modern public health conventions, increasing potential for rapid transnational communicability of disease, and significant incidence of breathable pollution for common citizenry. But before drawing such a conclusion, we might ask: what counts, and doesn't count, as a mask; and what is, and isn't, disability? Mask forms and figurations are multiple and complex and deserve a closer look; value of disability is similarly mobile, attachable variously to human bodies, notions, and abstract entities. From a broad viewpoint, facial masks certainly symbolize more than illness or its possibility. They also suggest (and have historically been used to symbolize) horror of disfigurement, use of ritual, protection of self and other. Indeed, much work has been done in drama studies and anthropology on theatrical and ritual effects of masks. In today's political environment, how does role of masks in obscuring face work within a national public? And, observing that masks can incite complex emotions from various perspectives, how does visage itself enable, disable, or compound affect? For purposes of this experimental essay, the is considered quite openly. Visiting an array of citations (public announcements, journalistic photos, artistic re-creations, television series), I discuss questions of security and sensitivity before turning to a consideration of Levinasian facial ethics as well as Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of masks. I propose that masks could be understood as roving, material instances of a screen, one that bars access to visage while functioning as a device of projection for others. In specific sites, such a screen functions epistemologically to translate for or against face, where face is understood as a prioritized site of human engagement. To clarify, this essay intends to undo any singularly assured mask visual trope by running among diverse exemplars (with all their anthropological, horroristic, and ethnic trappings) to map their sensible geographies, and to ask what their often polarized and racialized valences might tell about investments of nationalistic self- imagining. Ultimately, my hope is that masks appear less as concrete objects per se than as screens with affective resonance. Thinking through Deleuze and Guattari and others, such screens are what I will claim most stably undergird projects of securitized, nondisabled whiteness. I discuss how this screen today might bear ever greater affective intensities, since it occupies a primary symbolic position within overlapping discourses of security

Computer security · Computer Science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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