Virus government – A twenty-first-century genealogy of the ‘Dusk mask’ as biopolitical technology

ABSTRACT

This essay provides a genealogy of the recent operations of ‘virus government’ in the United States which followed the early twenty-first-century governmental discourse about and technologization of Homeland Security and a War on Terror. Through the genealogy, the essay asks what has and has not changed during the last twenty years of governmental and biopolitical response to public safety and social security as a personal responsibility. To understand and rethink that history, the essay proposes the usefulness of considering the COVID mask as a technology of virus government and as a Liberal object.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID
• governmentality
• biopower
• Liberal objects
• warfare
• (Homeland) security

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Hay

James Hay is a Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Department of Media & Cinema Studies in the College of Media at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. He is the ex-Director of the Institute of Communications Research and the ex-Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies.