ThesisCrazy 2025 pt. 3 - The Fascinating Anthropology of Perfume

This is the last part of this year's ThesisCrazy Series.

Interviews by Zoomy

Alexandra Segal ’25 (she/her), major and thesis in anthropology, carrel #409

Title: “On the Nose: What to Learn from Funk and Fragheads”

On her topic: “My topic is about perfume, and how queer people specifically use perfume to play with gender, to play with sexuality, to play with a sense of self through the sensorial experience of our noses and smell and to become other people, relate to other people, dream of other people, but also envision different versions of ourselves through olfaction.”

On how she thought of her topic: “I was introduced to smell as like a lens to analyze structural power last February because of a talk that the Sniff working group posted on campus. The Sniff working group is a faculty group from all different departments, they come together and they talk about smell, and I’d never heard of it before. It was buried in some email, like the “events happening this week” email. It wasn't really advertised well, but it was their only event that was open to students and I was like, holy shit, I want to do that. And then the next day they were doing a perfume making workshop. I went to the talk and ended up connecting with the person giving the talk, who was the founder at the Institute for Art and Olfaction, which is where I did my field work last summer. And from then on, I was like writing all these papers about scent as a way to analyze structural power.”

On their current mental state: “I'm really excited to share my work with my interlocutors. I think that when I was doing this project, a lot of the people that I was talking to were saying things like “fragrance has no gender,” and things like that. And it's like, I totally understand the rejection of the mass market and creating a binary of what is masculine and what is feminine. And still, there's so much potential in the fact that those are seemingly natural things, and to explore that and feel what it feels like to be generally femme-presenting and then put on a really sharp, masculine cologne. What does that feel like in your body? Also, what does it feel like to present that to somebody else and look at their confusion? One person that I was talking to in the mall, she was like, “Yeah, women can wear men's cologne, I guess, but they'll always ask ‘Where's the man?’ and we'll never be able to find him.” And, like, that's confusing for people and I think that that confusion is what queer and trans people lean into, because it's also a much safer way to play with gender than maybe a visible presentation would be. I just want to talk about this with people and I'm really excited to keep the conversations going and share my work with people and have people read it and talk about it. And that's where my mind has shifted, I think, because I'm ready to have those conversations instead of just being up in my bed stressed and writing about it for so long.”

On her most upsetting thesis experience: “Missing the deadline. I was trying to search for the submission link and the only place that the submission link was in was in an email from 10 days prior to the deadline. You couldn't search in your WesPortal. So I was like, listening to the 10, 9, 8, and I just started laughing because I was like, this is hilarious that like, after all of this, the thing that's tripping me up is not finding the link. And that was really upsetting, but my friends came home after the champagne pop and I was naked in bed, crying. The light was coming in, and my friends all lined up around my bed and were really comforting, so it turned into a pretty beautiful moment. And then I petitioned, with the help of my advisor and my department chair. It ended up being approved within 13 minutes after the deadline to submit the petition. And then I did Undies in Olin and it was fine.”

On what she did after she handed her thesis in: “Because I missed the champagne pop, I ended up having my DIY Prosecco pop on this very porch. I just texted people “show up if you're free”, because I really wanted to feel the yeast and the bubbles and the stickiness. And I felt really grateful that my friends wanted to also provide that for me, and it was just really nice to still have that moment.”

On her favorite form of procrastination: “I cooked a lot. It's a really nice way to get your mind off of things. And then you get a beautiful snack, but it can take like four or five hours if you really put in your elbow grease, plus the dishes.”

On her favorite part of her thesis: “This answer is probably going to change every day, but right now… I gave my readers these scent strips that accompany the thesis, so that you smell them as the material comes up in the text. I think that was a really cool way to play with form and also just embrace what my thesis is really about, which is to encourage people to know the world through smell, and to increase access to perfumery in general.  I'm doing a perfume workshop next week which I'm very excited about. It's for this class called Producing and Performing Anthropology. I always wanted to do some kind of sensory aspect to the thesis, but it's not considered by the department to be a part of the thesis. But for me, it is.”

Advice for future thesis writers: “Know that you will get behind and that it will be fine. Like, you can turn in the work in an unfinished state and still be really, really proud of it, and trust that this is a living document that you will return to in some fashion. People will want to engage with your work, no matter the state that it's in, and to be open to that conversation and that vulnerability in sharing your work will make it a lot better and richer and more meaningful, I think.”

If their thesis was a song: “I have a playlist about my thesis, kind of, but it's like a weird song. It's called “One, Two, Three” by Kenichi Kasamatsu. It's just a two minute song of people breathing.”

On her most used word/phrase: “Perfume, fraghead, funk is a really big idea in my thesis, queerness, definitely a lot in there.”

Theses feces: “A lot better.”