The sci-commodity sensibilities of performative Covid-19 face masking

Abstract

This article explores how extravagantly visible mask-wearing relates with consumer culture. Methodologically, three purposively chosen case studies of spectacular or performative mask-wearing are used to show what the face mask can teach us about consumer culture in a pandemic. First, a Daily Mail (UK) article in which an ‘elderly shopper’ is shamed for wearing a sanitary towel as a face mask is used to explore the politics of disposable commodities. Second, the multiplying portraits of people wearing masks archived under Instagram’s #MaskSelfie hashtag allows an examination of how consumer-citizenship is performed. Third, the presence of extremely expensive luxury designer masks, as evidenced by Rich Mnisi’s Swarovski-encrusted offering, is a base for considering how virtue signalling has become a platform for luxury branding. Building on these three examples, the argument is made that waste, selfies and luxury are modalities for a pandemic commodity politics that is layered over and into the scientific citizenship signalled by the wearing of face masks. Together these create what I call a ‘sci-commodity’ sensibility, in which the face mask as a technology has become integrated with the modalities of consumption. This has resonance with ongoing debates about the object, subject and brand in consumer culture.

Face masks: political flashpoint or scientific intervention?

In the unfurling global crisis that is the Covid-19 pandemic, much has already been written about the cultural politics of contagion, governmentality, individualism and citizenship in relation to the virus and our response. This article contributes to these discussions by focussing on the face mask, an item that became a ubiquitous personal necessity almost overnight. It argues that the face mask can be understood as a ‘sci-commodity’, that is, as an item that integrates the object agency and communicative aspects of the commodity and certain key scientific functionalities. Through a theoretical discussion of three purposively chosen case studies, three ‘sci-commodity’ aspects are explicated. These are, first, in relation to waste, how the commodity can emerge from science, second, in relation to selfies, how the commodity can serve as a screen to communicate science, and third, in relation to luxury, how commodity culture can subsume and eclipse science altogether.

Existing writing on the place of the face mask in the pandemic, from the cultural studies perspective, has fruitfully revealed the ways in which masks and debates about government directives to wear them have been embedded into right-wing performative politics, including toxic masculinity (Harsin, 2020) and white supremacy (Clarke, 2021; Silva, 2021; Smicker, 2021). Although the face mask has become a new site for culture wars and highly visible forms of ‘toxic mask-ulinity’ (Palmer and Peterson, 2020), the science is clear on the important role that face masks play in preventing or minimising virus spread. Many citizens have taken up, be it enthusiastically or reluctantly, wearing the face mask as public health intervention to slow the spread of the virus.

This article explores the sensibilities expressed in enthusiastic mask-wearing discourses, rather than vehement anti-masking. Specifically, I seek to examine how some forms of extravagantly visible mask-wearing relate to consumer culture, which far from being compromised by the pandemic seems to have been bolstered. I show how waste, selfies and luxury are modalities for a pandemic commodity politics that is layered over and into the scientific citizenship signalled by the wearing face masks; in other words, the sci-commodity sensibilities of the face mask. Methodologically, I use three purposively chosen case studies of spectacular or performative mask-wearing to show what the face mask can teach us about consumer culture in a pandemic. These are: A Daily Mail (UK) article in which an ‘elderly shopper’ is shamed for wearing a sanitary towel as a face mask; the multiplying portraits of people wearing masks archived under Instagram’s #MaskSelfie hashtag; and the rise of extremely expensive luxury designer masks, as evidenced by Rich Mnisi’s Swarovski-encrusted offering.

The wearing of face masks during a pandemic is nothing new. The 1918–1920 influenza outbreak killed an estimated 500 million people worldwide (Centre for Disease Control, 2019). Then, the wearing of face masks was also mandated by authorities, as resurfaced images of health workers and citizens on American streets wearing face masks during the pandemic a century ago show (Hauser, 2020). In East Asia, the public wearing of face masks has been common for a long time (Yang, 2014), due to experience with respiratory epidemics, including SARS, MERS and bird flu (Amer et al., 2018; Nature.com, 2019). In 2020, as scientists raced to understand the novel coronavirus’s provenance, behaviour and treatment, and vaccination potential, the face mask (along with distancing and hand-washing) was a key behavioural intervention mandated by many governments around the world. According to the best available science, face masks significantly minimise the risk of passing on or catching the novel coronavirus, and universal use is the most effective public health policy recommendation (Chu et al., 2020; Esposito et al., 2020). Interceding in the most literal way between the airways of individual human beings and the aerosol particles that carry the virus, the face mask is placed in-between internal air passages and the air outside, and as such is a key scientific, evidence-based intervention that can save lives and minimise the impact of the disease. The mask is an effective technology (an innovation that puts scientific knowledge to practical purpose) widely available to fight the pandemic. When people wear face masks, be it reluctantly or enthusiastically, they are signalling an implicit or explicit acceptance of the science driving the practice, and they are using the commodity on the basis of scientific evidence.

Object agency and ‘other-media’: theorising the face mask

The face mask is a scientific intervention, with a political life in discourse and policy. But it is also, most obviously perhaps, a material object that is manufactured, distributed, consumed, bought and sold: it is a commodity. A global shortage of medical masks in the early months of the pandemic meant that N-95 and surgical masks quickly became one of the most eagerly traded global commodities. In any crisis, someone profits through the supply of necessities.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2020) reported in early May 2020 that demand for masks far outstripped supply and that additional production capacity and streamlined certification processes would be required in order to respond (p. 2). Governments removed import tariffs for masks, placed bans on exports for local manufacturers (OECD, 2020: 8–9) and raced to procure more masks, sometimes with questionable results. The United Kingdom saw furore over the acquisition of ineffective masks (Kemp, 2020), while the United States has battled ‘chaotic, cut-throat’ conflicts between state and federal health agencies competing to procure needed protective items for health workers (Clark, 2020). China dominates the global market for the export of disposable face masks, with a 42% share, with the United States next at 18% (OECD, 2020: 7). During 2019, China reported producing around 20 million face masks per day (OECD, 2020: 6). In late April 2020, it was reported that ‘since 1 March, according to China’s customs service, it has exported 26.7 million N-95/KN-95 masks, 504.8 million surgical masks’ (Edwards, 2020); in other words an astronomical increase since the previous year. In response to demand, retail prices of medical face masks also went up, for example, by 319% in 1 month in the United States, forcing governments to implement measures to prevent exploitation of consumers (OECD, 2020: 3). Price gouging quickly became a feature of local markets, and governments were forced to step in to resolve disputes, for example, in South Africa where a large pharmacy chain was found guilty of charging excessive prices for surgical masks (Business Day, 2020) and the United States, where a Georgia businessman was charged with hoarding 200,000 masks with the intention of selling them at the highest possible price when they were most in demand (Fazio, 2020). Early on, actual and potential shortages of personal protective equipment for health care workers provoked public pleas for ordinary people not to hoard the disposable masks (Cramer and Knuval, 2020; Nguyen, 2020).

The face mask, like any object, has a cultural and social life (Appadurai, 1988) that can be ‘followed’ (Marcus, 1995). And, like many objects, that cultural and social existence is socially constructed, to a significant extent, through media representation (Chouliaraki, 2006; Silverstone, 2005). Face masks have become highly visible items, across pandemic-specific and general media coverage. Although in this article I theorise key case studies to do with some ways face masks have entered media discourse, it is key to remain attuned to their ‘objectness’. Jane Bennett argues that all objects have an ‘intrinsic liveliness’, or ‘thing-power’, which means that a thing can exceed its ‘status as object’ such that it manifests ‘traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience’ (Bennett, 2010: xvi). Considering how face masks play roles in public life demands, we first acknowledge the potential of things to do and be, rather than simply be done to, that is, produced, consumed and manipulated through human subjectivity. This is not an argument suggesting object determinism, for human agency will always interact and intersect with the agency of objects, especially in consumer culture (Iqani, 2012), but to give some attention to the power of objects as they move through culture, and interact with human subjects, through accident, choice or imposition. Put in appealingly simple terms, ‘things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power’ (Bennett, 2010: 3). Embedded in the midst of a pandemic, as I write this, I cannot think of an item that proves more clearly than the face mask that ‘objects have a life [. . .] because of their capacity to make a difference in the world and to have effects’ (Parks and Starosielski, 2015: 10). Face masks are ‘intermediary objects’ in the actor-network-theory sense (Latour, 2007); as ‘physical entities linking human subjects’ (Lenglet, 2014: 313) they facilitate multiple possible forms of agency, action, reaction and meaning.

Media have been theorised as the great connectors, the conduits and channels that bring human beings together across time and space, allowing us to ‘speak into the air’ (Peters, 2012). In contrast and quite literally, face masks are there to stop us emitting a virus carried by droplets and aerosol particles (Jayaweera et al., 2020) into that air, making us speak into barriers instead. Face masks represent the application of scientific evidence into practice. As a form of technology they are therefore also by extension, a form of media. Like concrete, the face mask ‘needs no metaphor’ (Feigenbaum, 2012): its presence is literal but the uses to which it can be put are multiple: concrete walls separate but also serve as screens for communication (as the anti-masking culture wars have shown). The face mask, like the wall, is an object that can come to ‘mediate and articulate politics’ (Feigenbaum, 2014: 16). As such, following Feigenbaum, I theorise face masks as ‘other-media’, that is, as technology objects with ‘material and expressive qualities that lend themselves to an analysis concerned with communicative phenomenon’ (Feigenbaum, 2014: 16).

There is a complex resonance between these theoretical aspects of the face mask, which speak to the interconnectedness not only of diverse human subjects through various object forms and processes, but also to the multiple complex ways in which subjects and object co-define one another. The study of media forms and processes lends itself to thinking in complex ways about the subject-object dialectic; in the case of the face mask, it highlights the communicative power of all social items and their embeddedness in culture. Scientific evidence has forced the mainstreaming of the face mask as an intervening technology, and a new everyday necessity in many contexts, into pandemic commodity politics.

In the following section, I animate three iterations of the face mask as a commodity (other-media object with thing-power), as revealed in modalities of waste, selfies and luxury. Each of these modalities has some resonance with the scientific functionality of the face mask, and reveals one aspect of its sci-commodity sensibilities.

Trash, selfies, luxury: three example of visible face mask compliance

I have purposively selected three case studies in which compliance, even enthusiasm, is shown with the directive to wear face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each case study deals with waste, selfies and luxury, respectively, which are key aspects of consumer culture and theorising commodities, as I have written about elsewhere (Iqani, 2019, 2020; Iqani and Schroeder, 2016).

Gendered commodity disposability and single-use face masks

In this section, I explore how disposable face masks once chucked, become a new form of trash created by consumer culture. I develop this through a discussion of an extraordinary ‘sighting’, and consequent media coverage, of the use of a menstrual maxi-pad as a face mask. This is one of many examples of do-it-yourself face masks that people invented out of necessity or in mockery of mask mandates. These gained visibility in viral online sharing and were archived into buzzfeed-style compilations of unusual, silly or otherwise amusing alternative face coverings.

On 15 April 2020, the Daily Mail Online published an article with the headline, ‘Elderly man shocks fellow shoppers as he browses supermarket aisles wearing a SANITARY TOWEL as a mask’. In classic clickbait style (Scott, 2021), the Mail narrates the story: a fellow shopper saw the man wearing the sanitary towel over his face, and snapped a mobile phone video, presumably without his consent or knowledge. The grainy footage is reproduced into a photo essay, showing various angles on the same scene, and accompanied by a sensationalist write-up of the ‘innovative mask’, including the claim that he ‘didn’t seem to know what he was covering his face with’. The person who shot the video had to ‘do a double take before I realised what it was’. The drama in this report is organised around two men, one of whom seems unperturbed by wearing a feminine menstrual product on his face, and another who is shocked to see such a thing openly displayed in public. This case study allows for a consideration of the gendered commodity politics of disposable face masks.

Disposable surgical and N-95 face masks are made from the same materials – polypropylene – used in the manufacture of disposable baby diapers and menstrual products (OECD, 2020: 5), none of which are recyclable. Like menstrual products, face masks are worn by necessity more than choice. Whatever his motivations, which are impossible to deduce from the Mail article, the ‘elderly shopper’s’ choice to wear the menstrual pad as a face mask highlights the similarities between the two types of disposable products, which are illustrated by Figure 1, showing him alongside his wife, who is wearing a normal disposable mask. Sanitary pads and tampons, used for menstruation, have specific gendered connotations (Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler, 2013; Rosewarne, 2012). Although the face mask is not designed to absorb menstrual blood, and the menstrual pad not designed to block the passage of virus-laden aerosol particles, that they are made of the same non-recyclable disposable material is significant. When the plastic mask is crumpled and thrown away – often it seems, on the street – it may be hard to distinguish it from other disposable personal care commodities. It thus gestures at forms of abjection to do with bodily waste and health care.

Figure 1.

Image from Daily Mail Online, 15 April 2020.

As Mary Douglas wrote, purity is associated in Western ideals with civilisation and even godliness (Douglas, 2013), and overproduction is equally a characteristic of Western economies. Disposability is linked to dirt; items must be disposed of once dirtied through personal or medical use on or in the body. Single-use menstrual products are tossed once soaked with blood and single-use face masks once contaminated with virus-laden aerosol particles. Consumer culture made the turn to the disposable (Giroux, 2008; Strasser, 1999; Yates, 2011) in the names of the so-called civilising virtues of convenience and hygiene, suggesting that it is cleaner to use an item once and toss it, than to wash and reuse said item. When it comes to medical waste, that logic is certainly stronger, as the potentially infectious bodily fluids that meet the disposable personal item indeed pose a potential danger. The disposable mask signifies, like the sanitary pad, human waste, filth and disease. The elderly shopper’s version of the disposable face masks gestures to the existential angst engendered by disease and possible death; it also hints at the unequal burden of the inhabiting of that borderline by women, who are disproportionally the people who menstruate, who take on childcare, who are health workers, and who use the disposable items made from polypropylene, as well as clean them up, particularly during a pandemic (Andrew et al., 2020; Hupkau and Petrongolo, 2020; Wenham et al., 2020). It is significant that the Mail reports that the person who videoed the man ‘spotted the elderly man’s wife giving him a hand putting on the sanitary towel mask in the carpark before heading in to the shop’.

Although people are justifiably afraid of the virus, and there is a direct link between the surface of polypropylene masks and infection, there seems to be a deeper level of disgust at play in how the ‘elderly shopper’ and his sanitary pad/face mask were spotlighted by the person who took the video, and the Mail, as worthy of being ridiculed. The sanitary pad mask provoked revulsion in that something that patriarchal society expects to be hidden from public view was brought into full sight, and on a person not normally associated with menstruation in terms of age or gender.

Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without [. . .]. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual) [. . .]. (Kristeva, 1982: 71)

The sanitary pad face mask flags how the disposable polypropylene face mask, as ‘jettisoned object’, draws us ‘to the place where meaning collapses’ and forces a sense of the uncanny (Kristeva, 1982: 2); it shows what we permanently thrust aside in order to live, taking us to the border of our condition as living beings (Kristeva, 1982: 3). The trash created by face masks shows how disposability in its essence may well be industrial capitalism’s response to patriarchal culture’s disgust of the feminine and feminised body. Furthermore, it also highlights the central role that disposable commodity culture plays in the broader sense of crisis, in this moment of late capitalism where climate change and environmental destruction have augured the emergence and spread of deadly viruses. Here, the commodity comes from science (technologies of plastic production, and medical personal protective equipment) and is signalled as both part of disposable consumer culture and advances in body-care technologies.

Performing consumer-citizenship through #MaskSelfies

A new genre of selfie, the #MaskSelfie, has proliferated in the pandemic. Because these selfies prominently feature the wearing of face mask, I argue that they offer a site for performative citizenship including the acceptance of evidence-based scientific public health interventions.

The hashtag #MaskSelfie had, at the time of writing, over 61,000 posts. Figure 2 shows a screenshot of the ninth ‘top post’ when I searched #MaskSelfie on Instagram, on 20 May 2021. It shows a blond, white woman, wearing a reusable cloth face mask on which the following slogan is printed: ‘Facebook shows us who didn’t pay attention in science class’. The post is captioned with a range of hashtags, including #sciencefacts and #MaskSelfie and is striking in that it spells out what is implicit in any mask-wearing: that science proves that doing so makes a difference.

Figure 2.

@Realtenille’s Instagram post from 24 January 2021.

Unsurprisingly, considering the ubiquity of self-portraiture across social media, and the context of isolation and lockdown, the posting of selfies has neither ceased nor slowed since the arrival of the pandemic. Many social media users have taken to posting selfies wearing their masks – both disposable plastic masks and a wide variety of colourful and creative reusable cloth-fashion versions. #MaskSelfies follow the techniques of the selfie in framing and subject matter (Cruz and Thornham, 2015; Frosh, 2015; Iqani and Schroeder, 2016), with the only difference being that the subject in the image wears a face mask. Wearing a mask and posting a selfie while doing so is a political statement of self-care, solidarity and even online activism (McCaughey and Ayers, 2013). Masked selfies have multiple functions: they are advertisements for the stylish designer masks manufactured by small companies, fashion houses, and industrious home seamstresses; they promote the idea that wearing masks is not only a necessity but something that can be done with aplomb; and crucially they say something about the wearer: in short, that they are a good citizen who trusts in the science of masking up as a contribution to public health. Furthermore, publicly wearing a washable and reusable cloth mask is a moral act because it eschews the waste caused by single-use, disposable masks and helps ensure that health and care workers have access to their PPE supplies. #MaskSelfies promote the message that mask-wearing contributes tangibly and scientifically to slowing the spread of the virus. There is in wearing a mask something to be proud of: the #MaskSelfie captures these numerous messages in one image, as the post by @Realtenille shows.

In the ethos of self-branding, where social media and consumer culture combine in individualised projects of self-representation, the face is a central icon. Selfies have become ubiquitous and were a key cultural form long before the Oxford Dictionary named it word of the year in 2015. Self-portraits facilitated by digital technology and quickly and easily shared on social media function as statements of presence, existence, belonging and legitimacy (Chouliaraki, 2010). Portraiture, especially close-up images of faces featuring eye contact, is a key site through which the innate commonalities of all human beings are communicated (Hall, 2014; Hodge and Kress, 1988: 52; Iqani, 2012: 149). When we see other people up close – no matter how Othered they are by racial, ethnic, religious or other forms of socially constructed difference – and are invited to gaze into their eyes by virtue of the intimacy communicated by the portrait, it becomes harder to not recognise our common humanity: it is a form of I-contact through eye contact (Iqani, 2012: 152–3). In a similar way that fences and walls, meant to divide, can be repurposed as surfaces for communication (Feigenbaum, 2012), so too can face masks be repurposed as connecting rather than separating. In the #MaskSelfie shown here, the scientific work of the face mask is made explicit by the wording printed on the surface of the mask: in short, that science can be trusted, and that masks are an evidence-based scientific intervention that any citizen can undertake for the benefit of all.

‘No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard [. . .] can be constructed for processing signals in a common language’ (Haraway, 2004: 22). The very materiality of the face mask – placed as it is on the face, in a way almost merging with the surface of the body – means that it is both object and linked in strongly evocative ways to notions of subjectivity. Placed close to the skin, the face mask carries some of the resonant notions of skin-ness in its surface qualities, but it also gestures firmly back towards the science that proves barriers are needed to prevent virus spread. In the #MaskSelfie, object and the subject merge into a new image of the consumer-citizen (Canclini, 2001), one who contributes to both the collective good through personal action and individual expression through a form of fashionable consumption and personal display. More than this, the subject also merges – albeit temporarily – with the face mask as technology. This links to the idea of the cyborg (Haraway, 2004). In the cyborg, the body of flesh and blood (site of abjection and disease) merges with barrier as technology to birth a ‘hybrid of machine and organism’ (Haraway, 2004: 7). The cyborg is ‘a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (Haraway, 2004: 7) who is enmeshed in ‘a struggle over life and death’ (Haraway, 2004: 8). Both ‘imaginative resource’ (Haraway, 2004: 8) and revolutionary figure, the face mask wearing cyborg suggested in #MaskSelfies represents the possibilities of technology merging with subjectivity. These are progressive in that they signal ways in which science might advance human agency, and transgressive in that they re-engineer commonly accepted notions of subjectivity.

While the #MaskSelfies shared by ordinary people on social media are perhaps a relatively mild iteration of Haraway’s vision of the cyborg, they hint at the possibility of a post-consumer world, beyond irony and binaries, where face masks and other forms of technology are integrated with performances of citizenship, activated through the acquisition and display of certain commodities (in this case, the face mask). #MaskSelfies hint at a fleeting harbinger of cyborg futures in which self-representation merges with worn technologies. Here the commodity works for science, operating as a communicative screen on which an explicit message about the validity of scientific evidence is projected.

Face masks as platform for luxury branding

In this section, I consider the visibility of uber-expensive, luxury designer masks, and offer the example of the Swarovski-encrusted Rich Mnisi mask, as promoted by luxury influencer Sarah Langa, as an example (see Figure 3). Luxury designer face masks show how even items that are public health necessities during a global pandemic can and do become appropriated by commercial brands as a site for promotional communication. This is at once a form of consumerist virtue signalling and an advertising exercise. Because face masks by their very existence integrate an acceptance of the science of virus transmission, designer-branded face masks suggest a highly neoliberal, individualist narrative about how to survive a pandemic in style, as well as the persistent power of branding in a globalised consumer economy.

Figure 3.

@Sarahlanga’s Instagram post from 29 May 2020 promoting Rich Mnisi’s luxury mask.

Figure 3 shows the offering from South African luxury designer Rich Mnisi, a $100 Swarovski-encrusted mask (IOL News, 2020) as worn by influencer Sarah Langa. The image bears all the features of promotional luxury discourse: glossy textures and soft lighting, the presence of a glamorous, feminine model wearing the mask, and the aesthetic code of the magazine advertisement (even the sentimental prop of a lush red rose is included). The item itself is a crimson embossed face mask with a subtle mono-chrome leopard print pattern, studded with red Swarovski crystals, and embroidered with the words ‘RICH MNISI’. In promoting this designer mask, Sarah Langa puts ‘RICH MNISI on my face’, in order to communicate her elite tastes while conforming to the collective practice of mask-wearing for the greater good.

Partly due to the shortage of disposable masks, efforts to keep them for health care workers, and government directives for citizens to wear cloth masks when out in public, the market for reusable fabric versions emerged. A simple item easily crafted by home tailors, face masks are also manufactured by fashion brands around the world, both large and small scale. In early-pandemic France, luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton pivoted their factories to making PPE, which was broadly seen as an act of patriotism in a time of national emergency (Kavilanz, 2020; Petrarca, 2020). Louis Vuitton pivoted its factories back to luxury production, offering customers a $960 face shield, which as Vanity Fair puts it, offers a ‘side of extreme luxury’ to your PPE (Kirkpatrick, 2020). As such, the luxury face mask can be read as yet another iteration of the power of brands and their promotional communications in a neoliberal global economy (Arvidsson, 2005; Lury, 2004). Many African luxury brands did the same. Face masks now take centre stage in fashion communications, normalised as yet another accessory that consumers can use to self-style and present themselves as fashionable, yet another surface that brands can use for promotions on which designers can present an avant-garde aura while signalling that they are socially responsible, and yet another surface for personal self-expression in allegiance with the power of wealth.

As Vogue magazine pragmatically points out on its website on 3 August 2020, ‘It looks like we’re going to be wearing cloth face masks for a while, which is all the more reason to find one that you like’, and then offers a list of 100 mask options that can be ‘shopped right now’. Like every other commodity choice, your face mask has to be about you: what you like, what you want to say about your fashion sensibility, your aesthetics, taste and brand allegiances. Luxury brands pivoted their commercial offerings to offer face masks responding to this drive to individualism and distinction, presumably so that their brand loyal customers would have the opportunity to exhibit that loyalty from face to toe. In the dazzling and perhaps bewildering world of masks for sale, individual consumers are tasked with the responsibility of choosing a mask that makes a fashion statement speaking to their personal aesthetic, and brands have capitalised on this need for personal protection to extend their cross-media promotion (Hardy, 2010), deploying the face mask as a new surface for advertising. That face masks have become so quickly integrated into the fun fashionability, profitability and promotional communications of the consumer economy says something about how fashion is linked to public culture (Couldry and Inés Langer, 2005), but also how powerful brand culture is, in this neoliberal world in which health care is increasingly the responsibility of the individual rather than society and is framed as, to an extent, a matter of wealth and style. The emphasis on choice (Grove-White, 2001; Schwartz, 2005), having a multitude of options, is a key feature of consumerist discourse, and it is no surprise that the face mask has been co-opted into this value system, with both extremely cheap disposable and extremely expensive luxury items available on the free market.

Like #MaskSelfies, luxury-branded face masks signal participation in the collective project of public health. But they also serve as an extraordinary act of social and class positioning. Capitalism has turned the necessity into something that is luxurious as well as functional, that can speak for the user’s aesthetic and brand allegiances as well as protect them from possible infection. Luxury brands claim that the face mask can also be worn as a fashion item, and as such it can also be transformed into a high-end, elite object. But still, its scientific function remains. Thus, the luxury-branded face masks serve two forms of virtue signalling, both public health citizenship and elite brand allegiance. This takes ‘hygiene theatre’, in which ‘props, scenery, scripts, and stagecraft [try] to provide the illusion of exercising some control over this strange and mysterious illness’ (Erni and Striphas, 2021), into a new domain. In high fashion, the elite and rarefied features of luxury branding are deployed onto the surface of the face mask as technology, and the codes of haute couture are highlighted to suggest that individuals can control not only their personal style but their response to the pandemic itself through the multiple virtuous aspects of face mask wearing. By integrating the modalities of luxury with the scientific functionality of the face mask, luxury versions suggest that individual brand affiliations are not at odds with participation in public health directives and that personal versions of consumer capitalism can work for the public good. Here the luxury commodity consumes the science and reframes it into a branding exercise.

The face mask as sci-commodity: Covid-19 and consumer culture

Taken together, these three iterations of the face mask – as disposable object, tool in service of self-representation, and platform for luxury branding – bring new perspectives to the role of the commodity in the pandemic version of consumer capitalism. Science plays a role in all three versions of the commodity.

The sanitary pad face mask story reveals how commodities emerge from science. Disposable masks (and indeed single-use sanitary pads) are just as wasteful as polystyrene cups, plastic-shafted earbuds, drinking straws, among the many other forms of waste produced by consumer culture. Face mask trash forces us to consider the politics of plastic, the broader culture of disposability that characterises both environmental degradation and consumer cultures around the globe, and how wastefulness has been increased by the pandemic. News reporting about the new ways in which the pandemic is contributing to the scourge of plastic waste (Duer, 2020; Parker, 2018; Vaughan, 2020) highlights the compelling conceptual intersections between cultures of consumption and cultures of waste (Hawkins, 2006; Iqani, 2020; Strasser, 1999). And precisely because of the life-or-death danger of the pandemic, in which a mask acts as the screen preventing the virus from passing on, it is very likely that many single-use masks will in fact contain the virus. Hence, they are thrown away, like sanitary pads once used. But as environmentalists have argued for decades, there is no ‘away’. Rubbish well-managed ends up in landfills; poorly managed it ends up in huge ocean gyres where it photodegrades and enters the oceanic food chain (Freinkel, 2011; Gabrys et al., 2013; Hawkins, 2006; Hawkins et al., 2015). The slew of disposable masks will suffer the same fate as other commodities and packages made from plastic: adrift in the ocean, piled up in landfill, not away but here and persisting on the planet long after human bodies (and menstrual blood or viruses) ever could. Disposable face masks are yet another example of the environmental perils of single-use plastic, produced by the throw-away culture of a fast-moving consumer economy. And they signal the existential angst caused by both bodily processes and wasteful overconsumption (Iqani, 2020: 163). It can be presumed that most face mask litter is caused by ordinary people, as hospitals and health care centres have protocols for the disposal of medical waste (Patwary et al., 2011).

#MaskSelfies show how commodities can serve science, and hint at cyborg futures in which science citizenship redefines agency in consumer culture. One aesthetic and ethical consequence of the face mask is that, of course, half of the face is covered. As such, misrecognition is also possible. When parts of the face are obscured in some way, the invitation to recognition and identification inherent in the presence of a human face becomes partially obscured. The face mask, no matter how embellished, materialises the socio-psychological risks of misrecognition, which are embedded in class and social distinction (Lovell, 2007). Face coverings have been politicised in multiple ways in Western societies, for example, in debates about Muslim women’s choice to wear hijab or niqab (Al-Hejin, 2015; Edmunds, 2012; Franks, 2000) and even in the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes (Ren and Feagin, 2021). The face mask has fundamentally changed the ways in which people self-present online, and this represents a challenge to consumer subjectivity. The human face is a potent symbol of the innate humanity that we all possess (Levinas, 2006). What happens when half of that recognisable feature, specifically the part that speaks and smiles, is obscured? Do we lose the ability to recognise one another’s humanity, especially in the midst of heightened racial, religious and ethnic tensions in many countries? To a limited extent, perhaps. But the figure of the cyborg-citizen shown in #MaskSelfies powerfully expresses a social sense of self in terms of future, identity, care and citizenship. Because the wearing of the mask is a visible statement of commitment to the wellness of others, and the willingness to compromise one’s own visibility in order to ensure that the virus is less likely to spread, it expresses solidarity with science and other human beings.

Luxury-branded face masks introduce the idea that even scientific interventions can be appropriated as a platform for branding and elite consumption. Here, we see the re-inscription of individualist consumerist values on to the surface of the commodity. Neo-liberal and corporate power maintain huge control over the operations of everyday life, both in and through consumer culture. Brands seek to deploy their power in multiple ways even in the midst of a crisis. Although luxury is a complex field of study (Armitage and Roberts, 2016), and smaller African luxury brands (Iqani and Dosekun, 2019) like Rich Mnisi cannot necessarily be said to have the same kind of power as global luxury corporations, what is evident from the example is that face masks have been appropriated as a material and aesthetic surface for the construction and communication of elite brand messages. Brands produce value through the aesthetic and cultural labour of their consumers (Arvidsson, 2005). With the advent of glitzy pandemic face masks, consumer labour is enacted in the most intimate ways, through the wearing of items on the face. These glamorous face masks distance themselves from the medical connotations of the PPE worn in hospitals by medical staff and patients, and instead re-invent the items as fashionable accessories. This de-medicalises the face mask, and inserts it into the rarefied domain of luxury, thereby turning it into a surface for consumerist communication rather than statements of citizenship, even though arguably the functionality of the mask remains.

These three iterations of face masks in popular culture push forward theories of object agency and the communicative operations of other-media. The face mask as a key pandemic commodity has implications for understanding objects, subjects and brands in specific, and consumer culture in general. Masks are ‘other-media’, which have object agency and function as surfaces for communication. While face masks illuminate certain aspects of consumption-driven subjectivity and how the consumer economy has persisted, thrived even during the pandemic, they also have agency. The face mask is tradeable commodity, thing with agency, and surface for communication. Like many commodities, face masks have different manifestations ranging from the disposable and polluting to highly desirable luxury forms, all of which interact with consumer subjectivity and agency. But the mask is also, crucially, a scientific technology that is deployed based on evidence to intervene against the dangers of the virus. I name this double-presence of commodity and scientific tool the ‘sci-commodity’. A sci-commodity is an item that integrates the object agency and communicative aspects of the commodity and some key scientific functionality. The scientific dimension to the face mask, although not always fully functional (for example, when worn below the nose and mouth), is always implicit in the presence of every public display of its wearing, no matter how commodified it is by selfie or luxury culture.

As Arjun Appadurai famously argued, things have social lives (Appadurai, 1988). Every object, whether non-commercial artefact or mass-produced commodity, is created from particular structures of power and matrices of resources, travels through cultures in complex ways carrying meanings and provoking certain practices, and reaches some kind of end, rebirth or change of context, perhaps multiple times throughout its existence. So too, of course, do face masks, these newly ubiquitous sci-commodities that offer individuals a new way to participate, or not, in public pandemic life. Each individual face mask has its life story, but in their novel ubiquity so too does a collective story arise: the agency of the sci-commodity. The face mask is now also, for better or worse, an icon in consumer culture. It has a discursive life, in that collective meanings are generated, circulated and resisted in public, spatially and through global media narratives and debates. As other-media, the face mask has communicative agency and produces new assemblages of meaning, and connects new, complex forms of integration between subject and object, consumer and commodity, science and popular culture. Face masks illuminate and complicate key debates about the status of commodities, consumers and branding and the role of the individual consumer-citizen in evidence-based responses in times of great crisis. While the face mask teaches us about how neoliberal global consumer culture adapts to the context of a pandemic, it also serves as a useful summative icon for the complexities of consumption in a moment in history in which the role of citizenship in scientific interventions are laid bare by that pandemic.

Biographical note

Mehita Iqani is the South African Research Chair in Science Communication, hosted at CREST at Stellenbosch University. Prior to this she was Professor in Media Studies at Wits University. She writes on consumer culture, media, promotional communication, inequality, luxury and waste. She holds a PhD in media and communications from the London School of Economics.