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Accepted Paper:

Media of desire? Olfactory aesthetics and olfactory agency in an exhibit on human sexuality  
Susanne Schmitt

Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on the representation of sexual attraction in a Science and Medical History Museum in Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork it interrogates the conflicting meanings, agencies and aesthetics of odors that are (or have once been) considered to be aphrodisiatic within a western-European context.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution focuses on the representation of sexual attraction in a Science and Medical History Museum in Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the museum and moving through three different contexts of meaning, performance and (re)interpretation, it elaborates on the use of odors that are (or have once been) considered to be aphrodisiatic within a western-European context: drawing on a specific perspective, namely, sensory anthropology and ethnography, I ask how part of an exhibition about human sexuality at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden is being experienced by various groups of protagonists within the museum such as tour guides, security staff and visitors and how it relates to their experience of working at and visiting the museum as bodily beings. In doing so, I elaborate on the exhibit's smellscapes as constituent of the exhibition as life world and performative space for those who work there and interrogate what specific cultural meanings the senses of vision and smell convey in this microcosmic narration on human attractiveness that is strongly based on locally contested sociobiological assumptions.

Panel P37
The aesthetics and fictions of science
  Session 1