The Performative Role of Scent in Cultural Constructions of Gender
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research output comprises nine scent-based performative artworks that investigate the relationship between scent and socio-cultural systems of binary gender. These works are site- and context-specific and are disseminated in international solo and group shows in the UK, Europe and Canada. \n \nTaking binary gender systems and the inequalities they uphold as a site of critique, this research asks how scent can intervene, in both humorous and affective ways, in cultural assumptions of gender. \n \nInvestigating the cultural connotations of both natural and manufactured scent (and both ‘found’ and original formulations), Ursitti’s research harnesses scent’s power to evoke memory - and associated feelings - to challenge dominant conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity. This body of research takes a particular interest in the feminist artist’s interventions in masculine homosocial spaces. \n \nThis experimental research practice requires various stages of iteration, testing and development. Methods include: surveys of relevant scientific and cultural history literature on scent; collaborative working with scientists to develop new scent formulae; dialogues with psychologists to better understand the social significance and affective operation of scent; testing in studio with small sample groups; and public dissemination as a form of further testing the effectiveness of a particular scent in a particular context. \n \nAlthough consistently positioned as one of the world’s leading olfactory artists, Ursitti is less interested in developing new scent formulae as an end in itself and more interested in contributing to studies of the sociology of scent. Building on the research of sociologists such as Karen A. Cerulo (2018), who explores the role of culture in olfactory sense-making, and Kevin E. Y. Low (2005; 2007), who positions smell is a social intermediary that can manifest as a moral judgement of others, Ursitti research demonstrates, through practice-based experiments, the power of smell as a socio-cultural phenomenon.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".