Ordering volatile openings: instrumentation and the rationalization of bodily odors

Spackman, Christy

doi:10.1080/15528014.2019.1638135

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…46 Vaginal deodorants, their scents and their adverts 'repositioned the treated vagina … as newly sexually available, a medicated return to the imagined innocuous scent of … virginal youth'. 47 By linking freshness, femininity and marriage in its adverts, Femfresh hitched its product to societal norms around sex.…”

Section: Femininity Freshness and Changing Social Moresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

Payling

2022

Gender & History

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This article uses a 1972 television advertising campaign for Femfresh vaginal deodorants and the backlash against it to explore how women grappled with the permissive society in their bathrooms and living rooms. It uses women's magazines and the business archives of Femfresh to trace the popularity of vaginal deodorants in the early 1970s and show how advertising for the product played on women's fears of undesirability and shame about their bodies during a period of changing sexual mores. It details how feminist campaigners Women in Media (WiM) constructed a campaign against vaginal deodorants and how adverts for the product became linked in press coverage to trial television adverts for Lil-lets tampons, before analysing complaints made about both product categories collected by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The contested terrain of feminine hygiene advertising adds nuance to historical understandings of debates around 'permissiveness', suggesting that, for some women, frank discussions of bodily functions were not inherently 'indecent', but rather had a correct time and place. WiM's campaign and the complaints collected illustrate how women of varying political leanings utilised conceptions of shame to exert limited control over the extent to which feminine bodies were up for public consumption in 1970s Britain.We used to go round the pharmacists and have a good laugh at the huge lines of shelves filled with these strange things which we had never heard of … foot sprays, vaginal sprays, body sprays and even throat sprays … -we couldn't believe it. Gradually they have crept all over the place but I wonder if they are all good. 1 Shortly after this woman's trip, vaginal sprays, vaginal deodorants, or intimate deodorants as they were also known, emerged on the market in the UK, hitting shelves in 1963. Brands like Femfresh, Bidex and FDS (Feminine Deodorant Spray) soon developed a range of products, from dry sprays and talcum powders to washes and tissue wipes, of which the latter could be kept in a handbag for a midday freshen up of the vulva. As the market grew and vaginal deodorants were advertised more frequently

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Section: Femininity Freshness and Changing Social Moresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

Payling

2022

Gender & History

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“…Christy Spackman discusses a funk less desired. Her study of measuring smell with gas chromatography-olfactometry (GC-O) shows how the commodification of food flavor (flavorants) extends beyond high aesthetics and into erotic smellscapes (Spackman 2019). Her mid-century researchers established experimentally that what goes into a mouth comes out in a vagina.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

Tracy

Vaughn²

2019

Food, Culture & Society

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This introduction and special issue takes as its inspiration Kyla Wazana Tompkins' 2012 articulation of Critical Eating Studies. We examine how value is produced through the circulation and transformation of the parts that constitute eating and edible bodies. Guided by the presumed dead, done, and discarded, we find material and structural meaning by focusing not on finished goods but on by-productsboth intended and unintended. The Edible Feminisms special issue foregrounds scientific methods through which neoliberal market relations write-off matter and bodies as wastes and metabolic discontents. We explore how devaluation, or systemic discard, is built into technical modes of capitalist value production and echoes in social structure and cultural forms. In asking: what does feminism have to do with edibility? with waste and metabolic science? we illustrate the stakes of how, why and who of devalued parts and bodies. In the eleven essays of this special issue, we examine how cultural logics of devaluation (classism, racism, sexism) are related to the technical practices of revaluation (e.g. quantitative reductionism, nutritionism). We attune our readers to the messy insides of things, to food science through the Marxian concept of creative destruction.What does edibility have to do with feminism? With waste, or with metabolic health?In the late 2010s, women around the world produce a significant portionsome speculate more than halfof the world's food. Yet, women (particularly women of color) also face sharp hunger trends and gender-based barriers to resources like the land, tools and financing necessary for production (FAO; Doss 2011; Braich 2018). The lack of precise statistics, and the barriers to data collection

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Activating smell’s political potential through smellwalk route design

Mannigel,

Sabourin,

Spackman

2024

Multimodality & Society

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This text unravels the collaborative design approach we—Ph.D. researcher Lauryn Mannigel, science and technology studies scholar Christy Spackman, cultural geographer Kevin McHugh, and visual artist and Studio Arts instructor Vicky Sabourin—used to create the route of a guided smellwalk for Montréal’s Quartier Concordia, exploring the political potential of smell. Drawing from the perspectives of practicing artists who value smell’s ephemerality, contextuality, and materiality, this text outlines the development of the smellwalk route, where we tested Mannigel’s conceptual curiosity in designing a path around the Henry F. Hall building—a building with a contentious political past—and Sabourin’s familiarity with the smells of frequently encountered spaces at Quartier Concordia. By exploring the roles of geographical proximity and distance, spatial familiarity and unfamiliarity, and the recollection of smell experiences—creatively balancing preconceived ideas with chance and pragmatics—our creative process develops a practice-led framework for olfactory encounters and public discussions that may activate the political potential of smell.

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Ordering volatile openings: instrumentation and the rationalization of bodily odors

Cited by 3 publications

References 41 publications

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

Activating smell’s political potential through smellwalk route design

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