Emotions in the Museum of Medicine. An investigation of how museum educators employ emotions and what these emotions do

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore how museum educators employ emotions when they are doing guided tours and to investigate what these emotions do. The paper explores five guided tours in the Museum of Medicine (Uppsala, Sweden) located in the former Ulleråker psychiatric hospital and asylum. The guided tours take place in the exhibitions focusing on surgery, nursing and mental care, but this paper focuses on guided tour in the exhibition displaying mental care. The guided tours were filmed and documented using participant observation. The material is analysed with the help of Sara Ahmed’s queer-feminist phenomenological approach to emotions. The paper shows that the museum educators used a multitude of emotions to orient the students’ emotional experiences and their knowledge about mental care and mental illness. Emotional restraint, fear, antipathy and sympathy were expressed in relation to patients, and this contributed to an othering of patients. The depiction of patients was used to express empathy in relation to caretakers. The study reveals that the appropriation of emotions works along sanist norms that largely contribute to a further marginalisation of patients. The paper, therefore, calls for a further examination of sanist norms in cultural heritage productions.