The Masks We Wear: Watchmen, Infrastructural Racism, and Anonymity

Abstract

As COVID-19 has led to the politicization of masks and the donning of masks, the prescient commentary that emerges from HBO’s Watchmen speaks to our contemporary moment, replete with animosity, distrust, and wounding. Race, the legacy of racial injustice, and anonymity are major themes found throughout the series, which highlight the complicated nature of social control and the infrastructural legacy of racism. The mask itself is a site of struggle with polarizing calls for freedom from the mask as tyranny and freedom through the mask as safety, all during a public health crisis. In Watchmen, the deployment of infrastructural control and the implications of masking and unmasking are enacted through racist ideologies and promises of safety through anonymity.