Masking and meaning during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract This article contributes to the developing sociology of COVID‐19 literature by examining situational variation in mask‐wearing behavior during the early pandemic. Using interview data collected from residents of Brooklyn, New York during 2020, I analyze how people talk about encounters with masking in various social contexts. I find that the act of wearing a mask during the early pandemic acquired multiple, contradictory meanings that compelled opposite stances toward masking. On one hand, public health campaigns helped encourage mask‐wearing by infusing masking with notions of solidarity and collective responsibility. But on the other hand, masks also obtained meanings related to distrust and emotional distance that became highly relevant in intimate social situations: masking around friends and other close social network members could be understood as symbolically destructive to the relationship. By illustrating how people collectively negotiated these countervailing meanings during interaction, the findings contribute to knowledge about how relational characteristics and interaction dynamics shaped the ways that people understood and enacted masking during the early COVID‐19 pandemic.