Seeing the Pandemic through the Mask: The Production and Distribution of Immune Space

This study attempts to view the COVID-19 pandemic by placing the life cycle of the surgical mask at its centre. Traversing the various levels and layers that take part in the mask’s agency, from production, supply, distribution, inspection and use to its transformation into waste, it aims to capture the administrative problems, the injustices of accessibility, and the alliances and conflicts that the mask generated over the course of the pandemic. The research shows the mask to be an actant of the immune system, one that enables the production of a very particular type of space at work in the present pandemic: “immune space”. On this basis, most forms of injustice arising in the pandemic are reformulated as injustices of access to immune space. These injustices, we show, are social and ecological injustices affecting both humans and non-human living beings; they are grounded in all the institutions the mask passes through over its life cycle and in distinctions concerning the mask’s structure, quality and quantity. The mask thus emerges in the pandemic not only as an ally in the conflict between virus and human, but also, by virtue of its present and potential ecological effects, as an element of conflict.