Reading Images Against Racism

The Mandarin word shìchăng translates into “wet market”—a term that entered Western vocabularies with reports of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the theory that the virus was passed on to humans by an animal sold in a Wuhan, China wet market. Media misrepresentations of the markets have been prolific, drawing readers to join xenophobic calls for their global eradication, perpetuating a long history of associating racialized bodies with disease. In most neighbourhoods there is a wet market located within walking distance. These markets—which exist on six of the seven continents and go by many names—are natural meeting places. In afternoons, school children, parents, and elders transition together out of daytime activities into family and social time as they prepare for the evening meal. Local markets reflect and affirm the cultures and traditions formed by communities over hundreds of years. Ultimately, the condemnation of wet markets is merely one example of how gathering spaces are besieged by whiteness and other forms of normativity that are corroborated by poor media literacy, denying groups their essential places and ways of living and being together.

The volume of these entwined problems became increasingly troubling to me when I noticed a social media post made by an art colleague in late article titled “Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists,” written by Damian Carrington, environment editor. Below the headline is an image of the butcher section of a wet market. Four Asian people are visible. In the foreground, at the viewer’s left, a man wearing an apron and sanitary mask worn below his nose and over his mouth stands slightly away from a meat counter, where his eyes rest. His body is turned toward the camera. Behind him is a woman in profile, nose and mouth covered with a mask, standing at a display of whole chickens, in rows, lit by pendant lamps. He wears a , she a , head coverings indicating that they are Muslim. Partial views of two men wearing masks over their noses and mouths are in the background. Above them hang white-and-red striped flags with a navy blue rectangle in the upper left bearing a yellow crescent and 14-point star. Various cuts of meat, a scale, a bowl, cutting boards, and knives are on the counter and haunches of meat hang above. Occupying the bottom right quarter of the image is the head of a cow. The image description: “A poultry butcher at a market in Kuala Lumpur.” Masks, 2 a wet market, meat that westerners may find confrontational, and Asian people—these have recurrently been used as representations of the pandemic, but why? Why was this image chosen by the newspaper? How are the parts of this news story to be read as a whole? And what effect does sharing this representation have?