Visual signs like skin color are just one of many factors in how white femininity is being articulated and interpreted. Other important components are the concept of a Eurocentric and linear temporality and the importance of being situated as modern. This thesis explores how certain forms of white femininity, depending on their locus, are privileged while others are seen as broken according to a hierarchy of white femininity

Key to the dissertation are fashion-oriented white Russian women living in Stockholm, St. Petersburg and Moscow who are trying to embody ideas of modernities and normative temporality through the body and the senses. One way of doing so is by controlling their sensory expressions and thus that which white subjectivity has a long history of trying to transcend: the body. An example of this is the attempt to control smell, which works as a reminder of the primitive, animal, and outdated parts of the human being.

Instead of investigating the making of the modern body-controlled white femininity through discourses, representations or articulated thoughts, the thesis focuses on how white femininity is inscribed in racialized perceptions through the level of bodily habits – or more specifically bodily habituations of norms and body schedules. This is done through a multisensory method that centers the ways smell, the visual, the haptic and the tactile are used as a way to experience and express modernities. Another important factor is how white femininity never articulates itself alone, but is instead always-already intimately connected to other bodies and objects. Thus, white femininity must always be seen as an intercorporal exchange.