This standard action is seen as quite shocking to a Western audience. In a world of Insta and Facebook, our face is our moneymaker. It’s what gathers us our likes, our endorphins for the day. Before, one would only really see people donning facemasks in big cities and on university campuses, these people would usually be East Asian. Hence a facemask has an ‘Othering’ effect in a Western society. In a world of binary distinctions, if you are not the ‘normal’ you are the Other. Not only does it hide the face, an important signifier for both verbal and paralinguistic communication, but it also clearly points out who is the ‘outsider’. It all comes back to Edward Said and his work on Orientalism. Said was a postcolonial theorist who said that the Western perception of the East was a combination of two prejudices. The first, that their cultures are seen as mystical and exotic almost to a fetishized point. An example of this would be an intake in Yoga and Indian holistic healing practises that a few hipsters reading this will instantly recognise in themselves. The second, that their ‘exoticism’ equates to them being strange (because it’s not Western) and therefore lesser than. In both cases, the East is seen as the “Other”.
However, it also needs to be said that quite a few parts of East Asia didn’t wear facemasks regularly until fairly recently. When SARS occurred in the early noughties, Taiwan adopted wearing masks – overcoming the social stigma that if one was wearing a mask they were seen as deadly ill.
