Wizards, Masks, and Metagnosis: Is the Pandemic Truly Changing Us?

Abstract

Wizards, Masks, and Metagnosis: Is the Pandemic Truly Changing Us? Danielle Spencer (bio) How has the pandemic changed us, and what tools might we use to understand these changes? The mask is a useful figure in following these shifts. In March of 2020 when the first U.S. COVID-19 wave hit New York City, where I live, the streets were silent save the sound of ambulance sirens. Initially, wearing masks was verboten for non-clinicians. Then it became a voluntary act for the civic-minded, and then a mandate. In the present limbo of August 2021, as I write this piece, depending upon the context a mask can signal any number of things, from health status to political stance, to the daily progression of the Delta variant, to the intersection of global, federal, state, and local guidance and regulations—all in constant flux. And while living outside of societal norms has often been symbolized by masking (western gunslingers, superhero vigilantes, bank robbers), such a stance is now more likely struck by refusing to mask in the face of policy. How might the mask represent the changes wrought by the pandemic, and the possibilities it offers for further transformation? Alongside the figure of the mask, these changes can also be understood as an experience of metagnosis, a term I coined to describe the experience of learning something new about oneself when the “something” has always been there. It can occur with a medical diagnosis of a long-standing condition either when a condition remained undetected, or because of shifting diagnostic boundaries. Suddenly finding oneself in a different category often prompts abrupt reevaluation of terms like normal, impaired, or disabled. For example, when I learned of my lifelong undetected visual field “defect,” none of the labels such as defect or impairment seemed to fit, as it was my normal; yet at the same time, it was unquestionably real. Or when adults receive diagnoses [End Page 198] of ADHD or autism spectrum disorders—both of which have had considerable diagnostic expansion—they may feel an attenuation of life-long guilt and shame while simultaneously questioning the neurotypical bias of such pathological designations. Because these experiences often provoke a change in knowledge, “metagnosis” literally means changed-knowledge. In Metagnosis: Revela-tory Narratives of Health and Identity I examine this phenomenon as a fulcrum which generatively illuminates and destabilizes the balance between our bodies, lived experience, the material world, and the social constructions we deploy.1 Beyond individual diagnoses, it can illuminate experiences such as genetic revelations of biological parentage and geographic origin as well as broader realizations, such as societal reckoning with the longstanding disease of systemic racism. When it comes to the mask and its variable meanings for non-clinicians during the pandemic—it, too, can be understood as metagnosis, as it reveals ideologies, vulnerabilities, and attitudes which may not have been visible but were likely there all along. What is the significance of the mask for clinicians? What metagnostic moments might it reveal? Beyond their functional purpose, masks often symbolize professional identity. The physician memoir genre, for example, exhibits a persistent pattern of masking/unmasking, hiding and revealing. This theme is made explicit in titles such as Behind the Mask, Life Behind the Mask, Man Behind the Mask, View from Behind the Mask, Voice from Behind the Mask.2 Most of these “Behind the Mask” memoirs are by surgeons (who do wear masks while performing surgery) and all on this list are by men. Here the mask represents the barrier between physician and patient which these accounts tantalizingly promise to pull aside, showing the wizard behind the curtain. As surgeon Paul Ruggieri describes in his 2012 Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated . . . Life Behind the O.R. Doors: “I wrote this book to take you right up to the operating room table and give you an up-close view of what I see as a surgeon. I want you to meet the person behind the surgical mask.”3 Physician memoirs display this masking/unmasking trope in their cover imagery as well—explicitly, with a masked physician’s face, or suggestively, by only showing part of the...