On the Nose: What to Learn from Funk and Fragheads

Happy grad season!! This Odorbet word selection is by Alexandra Segal*, Wesleyan University class of 25, who recently wrote her undergraduate anthropology thesis on perfume and queerness. It received both High Honors and the 2025 Gay, Lesbian, and Sexuality Studies (GLASS) Prize for best research and writing in the field.

Alexandra grew up in Los Angeles but is eager to continue her work in anthropology and sex education wherever that takes her. Her love for perfume has been steady since she was a kid, and her thesis project, On the Nose: What to Learn from Funk and Fragheads, served as an opportunity to take perfume into academia and analyze how it shapes queer identity. Contact her at alexandra.jo.segal@gmail.com to read her thesis or to chat more!

Thank you Alexandra for your words below and to your continued success in research and writing on the senses! 

temporal drag: coming from Elizabeth Freeman’s (2000) Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations, a phrase to describe the sensation that the smell of grandma’s perfume or our ex-lover’s leather jacket brings us—a compulsion (or drag) towards the past in our progressive futures, to perform gender in an embodied and erotic fashion. a way to intimately feel, to smell, historical (performances of) gender in the present and in imagining the future.

funky: coming from L.H. Stallings’s (2015) Funk the Erotic, a word to describe a perfume that attends to the erotics of the body in a way that demands interrogating racialized and gendered structures of power and of smelling “good” and/or “clean”. oftentimes animalic, musky, or featuring smells of sex and of human or other-than-human bodies.

fraghead: somebody who is attuned to the world of perfume, and more specifically, niche perfume, in a way that turns fragrance into a tool or toy to be played with, messed with, and worn for experimentation and pleasure to do the critical work of understanding themselves and the social systems that shape them. importantly, neither anti-normative or normative; rather, highlights the play in perfume and in gender, and thus is inherently queer. (See also Wiegman and Wilson’s (2015) “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions.”)