Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses an anthropological lens to make sense of the expanding artistic creativity, related to hygienic masks and other face-covering devices in the times of Covid-19 in relation to other social meanings attributed to these objects. My reflection is based on ethnographic accounts of mask-making by four female artists (of Japanese-Canadian, Finnish, Ukrainian origins). They are all professional mask-makers, and produced masks before the pandemic. How did the global epidemiological situation change their vision of their art? How can these visions by professional artists productively inform anthropologists about new ways of theorizing the masks, their agency and performativity? Theoretically, I am interested in the symbolic polyvalence of masks as hygienic, aesthetic, sartorial and identitarian objects. How do new pandemic-induced meanings intersect with more ancient or traditional interpretations of masking for ritualistic purposes? Historically, ritualistic mask-wearing was often taboo for women (e.g. performances in ancient Japan, Africain tribes, during winter carnivals in Europe). In modern times, however, masks as epidemiological objects have been mostly crafted by women. This paper addresses the entanglements of all the (controversial) aspects of masking, stimulated by the global ascendance of masks as indispensable objects of the everyday. As my interlocutors suggest, after 2019 masks became sites for aesthetic and semiotic experimentation with different facets of femininity and gendered aspects of work. I argue that mask-making and face-wearing for artistic purposes sheds light on the inversion of traditionally distributed gender roles, and allows women to overcome isolation through (feminist) carnivalesque, that is often performed online.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".