The Face Mask In COVID Times

Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection

“…Emerging in response to concerns that the linguistic and cultural turn were “inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics” ( Coole & Frost, 2010 , p. 6), new materialisms works to unsettle the prioritizing of the social and discursive in the production of meaning, and to acknowledge the agentic capacities of human and nonhuman matter (e.g., bodies, environments, technologies and objects) ( Alaimo & Hekman, 2008 ; Braidotti, 2022 ; Coole & Frost, 2011). By exploring the material-discursive formation of experience, feminist materialisms orient thinking towards questions concerning how the phenomenon of wellbeing comes to “shape and be shaped by the elements of the world that women are entangled with” (Hickey-Moody & Collin, 2020; Coffey, 2021 ; McLeod, 2017 ; Smith & Reid, 2017 ). Some feminist scholars are also identifying how sport and physical activity can disrupt gendered normativity to create opportunities for women's wellbeing and recovery when “they generate pleasure, imagination, connection, strength and freedom as a gendered bodying that is not oriented primarily around feminized expectations of pleasing others” (Fullagar et al, 2019, p. 51).…”

“…Some feminist scholars are also identifying how sport and physical activity can disrupt gendered normativity to create opportunities for women's wellbeing and recovery when “they generate pleasure, imagination, connection, strength and freedom as a gendered bodying that is not oriented primarily around feminized expectations of pleasing others” (Fullagar et al, 2019, p. 51). Such theoretical approaches are important because they build upon and extend feminist ways of knowing women's experiences beyond individualistic and linear narratives of wellbeing that are too often tied to physical and mental health as absence of illness, or ill-being ( McLeod, 2017 ). Such understandings of wellbeing are particularly valuable in the context of the complex challenges posed by COVID-19 as a more-than-human phenomenon (Lupton, 2022; Searle & Turnbull, 2020 ).…”

The COVID-19 Mask

“…Instead, we are left to rely on gray literature public media sources, such as findings from YouGov, a British polling firm, which found early in the pandemic that only 58% of Canadian survey respondents indicated that they wear a facemask when out in public, a figure that was reported to be significantly lower than that of our American neighbors (71%) 16. The highest population percentages of mask wearing were found in Asian nations, with Singapore reporting 92%, followed by countries in the Middle East 15. These numbers have certainly changed with the onset of mandatory masking policies.…”

“…[7][8][9][12][13][14] And yet, interpretations of effectiveness and what constitutes legitimate information to corroborate its use seem to be entangled in its meaning. Lupton and colleagues 15 argue that the mask is more of a relational artifact, informed by its sociomaterial meaning, than a question of effectiveness. The authors put forward several rationales for how the question of "effectiveness" became conflated with political ideology, particularly in the United States when President Donald Trump professed mask wearing as a sign of weakness.…”

“…16 The highest population percentages of mask wearing were found in Asian nations, with Singapore reporting 92%, followed by countries in the Middle East. 15 These numbers have certainly changed with the onset of mandatory masking policies. Though helpful, such media public polls often lack the rigor of scientific inquiry, considering associated limitations and various threats to validity, and need to be considered both critically and with caution.…”