Disentangling the Protection Suit: Images, Artefacts, and the Making of the Health-Security Nexus

Abstract

The protection suit is the icon of infectious disease outbreaks. I argue that the protection suit has performative power not only by shaping the daily tasks of health workers and their interaction with patients, but also as a visual artefact and as a two-dimensional image determining how health crises and their security implications are understood and dealt with. The article proceeds in three steps: it firstly highlights the current absence of visuality in the academic literature on health security and makes the case for including it in the debate. Secondly, with recourse to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) it theoretically locates visual representations, as images and artefacts, as actors that act and enact each other in the health-security nexus. The third part of the article follows the protection suit during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and maps the visual network it creates. In doing so this article demonstrates how the suit as artefact and image constitutes a network that visually and sensually links the bodies of patients, health workers and distant viewers in complex and at times competing makings of health security.