Reckoning with Asymptomatic Illness: Visceral Certainty and the Limits of Communicating Risk

During the initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic, mask mandates became the fulcrum of hostile public conflicts concerning the nature of health risk, individual choice, mutual responsibility, and public trust in scientific institutions. While officials insisted that masking was the most effective way to reduce the asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus, antimask protesters contested the possibility that seemingly healthy people could transmit a potentially deadly virus. To evidence their claims of uncompromised health, protesters often engaged in exaggerated corporeal spectacles. Rhetoricians have productively shown how antimask protests served as discursive grounds for stabilizing cultural anxieties over hegemonic social scripts concerning race, gender, and neoliberal notions of civil liberties. This essay extends these efforts by considering what antimask protests reveal about the limitations of discourse-based rhetorical theories of risk to address what I theorize as visceral certainty in one’s health. Embracing a materialist lens, I analyze three viral antimask protests, attending to how protesters use breath, gesture, and body fluids to reject COVID-19 risk. I argue that antimask performances, as a form of embodied protest rhetoric, offer compelling examples of how dominant presumptions about what it feels like to be healthy constrain and overwhelm popular and scientific abilities to communicate health risks in the context of asymptomatic illness. As such, they demonstrate how the body participates in the enactment and asymmetrical distribution of risks in the public sphere.