How to Survive Contagion, Disease, and Disaster: The "Masked Asian/American Woman" as Low-Tech Specter of Emergency Preparedness

This article approaches post-9/11 public health anxieties as human-technology-border agitations. Face masks and narratives of un/masking function as key components in the discursive production of emergencies. Incongruities—of "what is human," "what is technology," "what is un/natural," and "what is native or invasive"—surface as unsettling specters and take the form of the "masked Asian/American woman." Government, science, and mainstream publications deploy her as part of emergency-preparedness pedagogy and performance. The masked Asian/American woman as an analytic construct, in an intersectional and transnational feminist science studies approach to analyses of public health anxieties, can provide insight into: neoliberal gestures of self-defense and individual responsibility; representational biopolitics of the global economy; gendered labor mobility across borders; configurations of monsters and ghosts during states of emergency; and health justice for women and immigrant communities. She is a low-tech specter of emergency preparedness. At best, her hauntings—spooky, tormenting, and, at times, comically bizarre—call upon the public to examine and challenge public health inequalities.