Before COVID-19, there was SARS: the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak of 2003. Unlike the global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic, most SARS infections took place in East Asia, and the disease had a very limited spread in the United States. Still, news coverage of SARS was typically accompanied by pictures of Asian women wearing protective face masks—an image that “expanded fear in the public’s imagination of ‘Asian bodies in Asia’ to include a fear of ‘Asian bodies in the United States,’” argues feminist scholar Clare Ching Jen.
As with COVID-19, the overseas origins of SARS also fueled suspicion of Asian contamination and foreign contagion.
“The masked Asian/American woman is Orientalized,” Jen writes. “She signifies China’s inscrutability, its feminized weakness, its uncivilized proximity to nature, and its riskiness and irresponsibility.” At the same time, “[t]he masked Asian woman simultaneously embodies SARS risk and responsibility.”
Jen’s research shows that the wearing of face masks was controversial in the United States long before the practice became politically polarizing during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Jen cites a March 21, 2003, article from Science that depicted one such subject in an airport, with the caption describing masks as tools that can “ward off an infection from a mysterious agent.”
The term “flight risk,” which also appeared in the caption, can be interpreted as symbolically “refer[ring] to the masked Asian woman herself—she is the ‘mysterious agent,’” Jen suggests.
Close contact with travelers from SARS hot spots was one criterion for diagnosing cases—a factor that leads Jen to observe that, “[f]or the US public, this masked Asian woman in Hong Kong’s airport embodies the risk of SARS infection—she is a risky subject.”
The face mask becomes integral to how the Asian woman is understood in terms of not just her race but also her gender. Jen compares a news photo of a masked mother and child in Hong Kong, which is accompanied by the caption “A mother takes precautions,” and another picture of an unmasked mother and child in Taiwan, at “an event celebrating the end of SARS transmissions.”
“In these examples, the visual presence of a mask and the acts of un/masking illustrate the masked Asian woman’s role as a good, protective mother,” she explains.
However, the face mask is also a low-tech device that, “through striking visuals and peculiar storytelling,” raises mental associations with both the comedy and the horror genres in turn. As such, Jen muses, the masked Asian “arises as a seething presence of unsettling incongruities—namely, what is human, what is technology, what is un/natural, and what is native or invasive?”
She points to an article by an American journalist reporting on SARS in Hong Kong, in which he reports that “[i]t was beginning to feel as if we were in a low-budget science fiction movie.” In this telling, the human and the technological “have merged to the untenable point where the naked, unmasked human face becomes terrifyingly unnatural,” she concludes.
More to Explore
Muslim Women and the Politics of the Headscarf
The fear and anxiety evoked by masked Asians—especially women—can be connected to another state of emergency: the global war on terror. Jen posits that the mask has a parallel in the veil worn by some Muslim women, since both “symbolize the Other’s feminized cultural difference as inscrutable and secretive.”
“Western imperialism deploys the veiled Muslim woman as symbolic of women’s oppression in ‘backward’ Islamic nations; it justifies military interventions in the name of women’s liberation, and it evidences success by unveiling Muslim women,” Jen explains.
Weekly Newsletter
This similarity in how the mask and the veil are characterized—as threatening covers that must be discarded—“operates according to an Orientalist trope that genders, races, and sexualizes the masked Asian/American woman as in need of Western liberation via penetration,” she adds.
Jen’s discussion was published in 2013, more than half a decade before the COVID-19 virus—an unwelcome relative of SARS—would make protective masks a necessity for billions worldwide. Yet recent events have shown the remarkable and worrying persistence of old tropes that link Asian bodies to the spread of disease.
The appearances of the masked Asian woman, which Jen dubs “spooky, tormenting, and, at times, comically bizarre,” still “call upon us to examine and challenge public health inequalities.”
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
