Breathing in a Pandemic: Covid-19’s Atmospheric Erasures

ABSTRACT:The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to consider our relations to the atmosphere, as social distancing and masking measures focus our attention on how we might limit viral exposure through our breath. In this article I trace these relations to theorize what I call atmospheric erasure, which refers to the ways that both elements of the atmosphere and groups of people may be rhetorically constructed as removed from or only partially relating to the atmosphere. I consider the repercussions for these erasures by reading the mask as a marker of racialized models of virality and (non)humanity, ultimately arguing that the pandemic focalizes our need to attend to ecological connections and erasures through models of the atmosphere.