I den här artikeln diskuteras kroppens och det sinnligas betydelse för kunskaps-produktion inom ramenför kritiska ras- och vithetsstudier. Artikeln erbjuder en skev och dekolonial metod som lyfter fram tre sinnliga tematiker: känseln,det haptiska och doften. Kritiska ras- och vithetsstudier, precis som de flesta andra vetenskapliga discipliner, har ofta utgått från blicken som en teoretisk lins: ”den andra” skapas via observationer, synliggörandet av vithet utgör en viktig dimension i ”märkandet” av den osynliga vitheten. Medan den kroppslösa blicken privile-gierats som en rationell vetenskaplig apparat, så har lukt och känsel underkänts och kategoriserats som de mest fysiska och kroppsnära sinnena. Andra sinnen än just blicken har därmed inte alltid betraktats som tillförlitliga källor till kunskap. För att belysa hur mänskliga hierarkier och skillnader skapas behövs dock andra sinnliga metoder än blickens. Mitt bidrag till att skeva kritiska ras- och vithets-studier består i att betona kroppen och det sinnligas centralitet i produktionen av kunskap. Artikeln består av en epistemologisk diskussion med utgångspunkt i frågan vilka sinnen som räknas som kunskaps bärande samt ett förslag på en metod där sinnen andra än blicken ges vetenskapligt värde. För att förtydliga hur det sinnliga samarbetar för att skapa mänskliga hierarkier ger jag två empiriska exempel från min forskning: ryska kvinnors modepraktiker samt ljud och rörelser som sensorisk orientalism inom rysk opera och balett. De två olika empiriska exemplen delar en teoretisk tematik: hur idéer om det ”o/civiliserade” och”barbariska” skapar gränser för det mänskliga och hur detta manifesteras via det sinnliga. I artikeln beskriver jag hur jag rent praktiskt hanterat och använt den skeva och sensoriska metodologin.

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. 

White femininity embodies a complex position. It manages to occupy the presumed empty, universal position, which is held to be racially unmarked, untouched, and clean, meanwhile whiteness is always already articulated from a somatechnical knowledge and practice. This article discusses how “natural” makeup acts as an (in)visible extension (and enabling) of white (un)clean Russian and Swedish femininity, and also as a way to establish boundaries between “natural” and “artificial” white bodies. Makeup, as an extension of the white femininity, sculptures temporal fantasies about the present and the past, as well as fantasies of modern and outmoded bodies. These kinds of separations allow for a structuring of asymmetric differences between white modern/“civilized” and non-modern/“non-civilized” femininities. The idea of natural/clean bodies (and their practice of modification) privileges some white femininities over others, through the way that artificial/“impure” expressions are associated with the part of whiteness that is “marked” by devalued class and race expressions. This infected forms of whiteness thus acts as the Other in relation to the clean subjectivity of whiteness and operates as a flexibility that keeps the radiance of whiteness intact and unchallenged. Based on this paradox the article wishes to show how white femininity should be understood in terms of a fantasm and construction, and it is as a fantasm the opportunity arises to reject various forms of femininities, meanwhile the fantasm have different components depending on where it is formulated.