Short abstract:

This paper argues that olfaction is a queer metabolic intra-activity that transverses spacetimematter, an erotic inter and intra-species communication enables humans and more-than-humans to become sense-able to and of each other.

Long abstract:

Cell membranes have receptors that hold and sometimes consume and excrete the volatile chemicals that cause smells. The sensations experienced during this interaction is olfaction. All critters do this, including single-celled organisms. Odorants (the chemicals that produce smells) are fundamental within metabolic processes, ingested, digested, excreted through the living, the non-living and the semi-living. It is deeply exciting to consider this interaction as a sensual, tactile interspecies communication that transcends language and transforms existence, where social behaviours are mediated by intercellular chemical signaling and surface sensitivity. These are communications where contact zones are literal; vision is irrelevant, touch is all. Bodies brush against each other and their surrounds, animated by chemical transmissions and transfigured by sensation. Communications are visceral: chemical signals excreted and caressed by cell surface moieties. Matter forms and dissolves as odorants are ingested, digested and excreted. This paper weaves together Barad’s concept of queer performativity, Hauser & Strecker’s (2020) microperformativity, Landecker (2011; 2023), Hird (2012) and Bakke’s (2017) understandings of metabolism as transformative matter, and Irigaray’s eros (1993) to examine how olfaction makes bodies sense-able to and of each other, an erotic inter and intra-species communication, a queer metabolic intra-activity that transverses spacetimematter.