Cambridge scholar Dr Amelia Louks could never have expected that sharing her
acheivement of procuring a PhD in English Literature could spill chaos. The reason? Her thesis.
Dr Amelia Louks shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) on November 27 celebrating her PhD with a short caption and an image of herself. The tweet which was supposed to fly under the radar of the twitter algorithm failed to do so because of her thesis that she was holding in her hand in this image. “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose”, was embossed onto the red thesis cover, and this title itself created a heated debate within X.
Dr Louks received immense backlash from popular far right acccounts on the platform calling her thesis a waste of resources and pointless. Many even went so far as to making sexist remarks reiterating patriarchal notions regarding women in higher education. They mainly hurled insults at her because she discussed the concept of “olfactory oppression” in her thesis. A harmless celebratory post had accidentally triggered a barrage of verbal assaults.
However, Dr Louks wasn’t alone in this as she found support with many coming to her defense. Many found her thesis to be very profound as it highlighted a very common factor of
human discourse that often gets sidelined; smell. Olfactory oppression itself is a form of discrimination based on body odour, or smell of an individual. “The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures”, as Dr Louks says in her thesis’ abstract.
Dr Louks’ supporters understood her thesis and agreed to the olfactory oppression that is present in our society and often gets depicted in media. The most famous depiction being that of the critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning South Korean movie ‘Parasite’. Throughout the movie, the rich family frequently passes remarks regarding the smell of their servants and by extension the working class.
Dr Louks discusses this movie in her thesis more thoroughly along with other popular and infamous works such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Virginia Woolf’s Flush, etc.
It was clear that those who were triggered by Dr Louks’ thesis did not bother to read further into her thesis to understand her viewpoint. This lead to further discourse about the rise of anti-intellectualism, particularly in the west, and how it often leads to fascism, as seen with Nazi Germany. Ever since the re-election of Donald Trump for another presidential term, there has been an uptick in far right propaganda and the proliferation of fascist rhetoric. The propagation of such Fascist viewpoints has been done through X ever since it was bought by the billionaire, Elon Musk, who also happens to be a close associate of Trump.
Since tweeting, the post has gained over 114 million views on the website and over 11 thousand people have replied and another 20 thousand have reposted it, making it one of the most viral dissertations.
