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Drawing on historical medical, scientific, and psychological publications, this article of fers a brief history of the idea of the »threshold«, insofar as it has been applied to smells and smelling. It follows two genealogies of smell-related thresholds, firstly backwards from 1980s cultural history, via 1930s sociology and psychoanalysis, to 1840s psychophysics, and then forwards from psychophysics, via fin-de-siècle experimental psychology, to 1980s environmental governance. Responding to concerns about the epistemological utility of smelling in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century witnessed attempts to render olfaction amenable to measurement, quantification, and visualization. Experimental psychologists aimed to construct pure noses and pure smells through experimental assemblages that used physical thresholds to give validity to the idea of olfactory thresholds. Since the 1950s these assemblages have been leveraged in regulating odor pollution. However, as in the case of environmental governance, the laboratory-origins of olfactory thresholds should give pause to smell studies scholars who seek to deploy the concept as an analytical tool or form of narrative emplotment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wherever sex and sexualities have been discussed within the Corona discourse, the focus was not only laid on considerations concerning hygiene-policy, but also on the importance of stimulating sexual pleasure under pandemic conditions. Within the mass media as well as in health authority guidelines, expectations became clear, that sexual pleasure could not only promote the immune system and general health conditions, but would also help to stabilize overburdened close relationships and to compensate for various psychosocial and socio-economic deprivations and stresses. In addition to self-and cybersex, this also applied to various interaction practices under conditions of physical presence. Compared to other contact restrictions in the time of the lockdowns, this ostentatiously liberal attitude towards sexual contacts seems astonishing. This article first works out the peculiarities and characteristics of corresponding discourses on a descriptive level. The findings are then analyzed in the broader contexts of the constitution and regulation of sex in modern society, whereby genealogical aspects are considered as well as questions of functional-analysis. Following neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theoretical perspectives, the problems, expectations, functions and contradictions associated with sex and sexualities are discussed in the context of social relations of production and power. Finally, the question is asked, which general contradictions of the modern sexual-dispositive become increasingly visible in the pandemic-induced state of emergency. Keywords: Critical discourse analysis, Corona, Biopolitics, Health prevention, Sexual pleasure, Self sex, Neosexual revolution, Normalism [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses relationship between biopolitics and education by using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics discussed include relationship between biopolitics and education in the ways and forms of speech on the subject of school and health before pandemic; information on distance rules and protective measures for educational institutions; and concept of power to the category of domination and related political connotations.