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For the past two years, mask wars have swept across the United States. This reflects the two-sided nature of the anti-COVID mask–it is a tool to fight a dreaded disease and the focus of a state-backed campaign of behavioral change (i.e., social control). To put the mask wars in perspective, this essay turns to an earlier social control campaign, the Soviet effort in the late 1920s to encourage women in Uzbekistan to unveil (the hujum). This paper looks at two perspectives on the hujum. The first, laid out in Douglas Northrop’s 2004 study Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, views the hujum as a failed attempt to impose Soviet values on an unwilling Uzbek population, a campaign that failed so spectacularly that the veil (paranji) became a symbol of Uzbek national resistance. Has the COVID mask, like the paranji, become a symbol of a failed state overreaching? Do the methods used by the Soviet state give us pause when considering our own campaigns for masking and vaccinations? By contrast, Marianne Kamp, in the New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity and Communism (2006) sees the hujum as a campaign against patriarchy.
Using oral histories and interviews, Kamp shows how Uzbek women were trapped between supporting the Soviets and following patriarchal veiling norms. While the paranji did not disappear, the hujum created a space where Uzbek women could choose to unveil. Have COVID masking campaigns stripped us of our agency? Would listening to people caught in the middle of the masking and vaccine campaigns lead to a better outcome? Taken together, the insights gleaned from Northrop and Kamp’s accounts of the hujum help shift the debate over mask wearing away from face authoritarianism, in which the state determines how human subjects present themselves, toward face libertarianism, in which the human subject is, in most instances, free to decide whether or not to cover their face
