Odour and Order: Smell, Culture, and Representation

For my office hours, please register here and indicate whether you would like the meeting to be held in person (3.04) or on Zoom.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f0iyE7-IHyMXCBMzfx01POLZS-khZgODfEMNS3c7aWs/edit?usp=sharinghttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1f0iyE7-IHyMXCBMzfx01POLZS-khZgODfEMNS3c7aWs/edit?usp=sharing

This seminar is concerned with the ways smell functions as a cultural phenomenon. How we perceive, categorise, and respond to odours is deeply embedded in social practices, political discourses, and systems of knowledge. Smell is not simply a biological sensation but a site where power structures and cultural hierarchies are produced and reproduced. Throughout history, olfactory experience has been systematically gendered, raced, and classed. European cultures, for example, constructed specific olfactory stereotypes and attributed them to racialised groups as a means of establishing social hierarchies. Similarly, while men were allowed to smell sweaty, women who did not smell ‘sweet’ were considered to betray ideals of femininity. Smell also played a role in maintaining class boundaries: while the working class was labelled malodorous, the upper-class body was deodorised in cultural and political discourses. In this seminar, we will ask, for instance: In what ways do cultural productions challenge or reproduce dominant olfactory regimes? How might scent function as a mode of resistance, intimacy, or exclusion? What kinds of bodies or spaces are made to carry odour, and which ones are deodorised?