Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores how scholars construct heritage when writing about psychiatric hospital and asylum cemeteries and, furthermore, investigates the role that emotions play in this process. 49 articles and books on the topic of psychiatric hospital and asylum cemeteries, published between the years 1996 and 2020, are investigated. Sara Ahmed’s queer feminist phenomenology is adopted as a methodological and theoretical approach. In this article, scholarly communication is considered a site where heritage is constructed and as ways in which heritage is constructed. I show that, by positioning graves as unmarked, unidentified and unnamed as well as forgotten and abandoned, scholars are drawing on anti-psychiatric discourses and sentiments connected to the family. This allows the cemeteries to be constructed as a heritage of regret, which further forms incentives for scholars to argue for management, conservation, and instalment of monuments.

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