Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation

Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)

“Smell is a cultural phenomenon,” writes Jonathan Reinarz in Past Scents: Historical Perspectives of Smell (2014). The ways we perceive, categorise, and respond to odours are deeply embedded in the social practices, political discourses and epistemological structures of our culture. Scent, therefore, is not simply a biological sensation but it is a site where power structures, cultural hierarchies, and systems of knowledge are (re-)produced. Throughout history, olfactory experience has been systematically gendered, raced, and classed. For instance, as Andrew Kettler demonstrates, European cultures have constructed specific olfactory stereotypes and attributed them to racialised groups as a means of establishing social hierarchies (2020, 7). This racialisation of scent finds its parallel in gendered olfactory hierarchies; “while men are allowed to smell sweaty, […] women who don’t smell sweet are traitors to the ideal of femininity and objects of disgust” (Classen et al. 1994, 164). Just as scent is implicated in the inscription of gender and race, it also plays a role in maintaining class boundaries through olfactory codes. Historically, especially during the late 1900s, while the working class was labelled as malodorous, the upper-class body was deodorised in political and cultural discourses (cf. Classen et al. 1994, 166; Reinarz 2014, 146). These intersecting olfactory hierarchies and how scent operates as an apparatus of social control have been extensively examined through cultural, historical as well as sociological lenses (see, e.g., Largey and Watson 1972; Jenner 2011).

Since Alain Corbin’s seminal study, The Foul and the Fragrant (1986), where he examines the active deodorisation of public and private spaces through improved sanitation, ventilation and floral perfumes, scholars of scent have also paid significant attention to particular smellscapes and how power dynamics operate through the spatial organisation and cultural organisation of odour. Most notably, Hsuan L. Hsu’s recent research (2020) has shown how smellscapes are not only shaped by hygienic regimes but also function as instruments of social stratification, demarcating between clean and unclean, civilized and uncivilized, desirable and abject. These ideological distinctions do not remain confined to the material world; they bleed into representation. However, while scholars frequently cite Orwell’s famous observation that “we were taught – the lower classes smell” (1937, 127) to illustrate the constructed nature of olfactory prejudice, their focus is rarely on the racialised, gendered and classed smellscapes that he invokes in his texts. As in Orwell, we observe a limited analytic scholarship that investigates how power dynamics of smell are negotiated, reinforced, or challenged within cultural productions.

This conference, therefore, invites a critical inquiry into the ways cultural productions represent olfactory power dynamics and aims to explore the following critical questions: How do, for instance, literature, film, television, theatre, and visual arts engage with olfactory imaginaries? In what ways do they challenge or reproduce dominant olfactory regimes? How might scent function as a mode of resistance, of intimacy, or of exclusion? How do visual and verbal cues evoke the presence of smell or of those marked as olfactorily othered? What kinds of bodies or spaces are made to carry odour, and which ones are deodorised? Building on these questions, this conference aims to bring together papers that examine the intersections of smell with race, gender, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability, investigating how olfactory meanings are constructed, challenged, and represented across various media forms.

We welcome submissions addressing –but not limited to– the following topics:

• Olfactory aesthetics in literature, film, and visual art
• The politics of deodorisation and cleanliness
• Urban, domestic and public olfactive landscapes
• Smell and surveillance
• Olfaction and diasporic memory
• Queer and feminist approaches to scent
• Smell and colonialism/postcolonial critique
• Environmental racism and toxic geographies
• Sensory hierarchies and epistemologies of the senses
• Perfume and consumer cultures
• Smell and trauma
• Medicalisation of odours
• Olfactory resistance

We welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages.

Please send abstracts of 250–300 words, along with a short bio (100 words), to odourandorder@outlook.com by 31.10.2025. The conference will take place on 13-14.06.2026 at Technical University of Dresden in hybrid format; participants may join either online or in person. 

The conference organisers are Nisan Karaca Odabasi, M.A., (Technische Universität Dresden), and Prof. Cornelia Wächter (Technische Universität Dresden).

We look forward to your submissions.

Works Cited:

Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Translated by Miriam Kochan, Roy Porter and Christopher Prendergast. Harvard University Press.

Classen Constance, David Howes and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. Routledge.

Hsu, Hsuan L. 2020 The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479807215.001.0001.

Jenner, Mark S. R. 2011. “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories.” The American Historical Review 116 (2): 335–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.2.335.

Kettler, Andrew. 2020. The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World. Cambridge University Press.

Largey, Gale Peter, and David Rodney Watson. 1972. “The Sociology of Odors.” The American Journal of Sociology 77, (6): 1021–34. https://doi.org/10.1086/225257.

Orwell, George. 1937. The Road to Wigan Pier. Gollancz.

Reinarz, Jonathan. 2014 Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. University of Illinois Press.