Representations of women : A study on how women are represented in exhibitions at the Museum Gustavianum and the Uppsala University Coin Cabinet.

This essay studies how women are represented in three museum exhibitions. The exhibitions are the Museum Gustavianum exhibition of the history of the University from the 1800s to the present day, the viking exhibition Valsgärde and the Uppsala University Coin Cabinet. The methods used in the study are Thick Description and Wera Grahn’s analyticcal tool, Five Questions to an Exhibition. As the theoretical foundations of my study I have used Hirdman's gender system and Butler’s concepts of performance and the heterosexual matrix. The results of the study show that women and men are displayed in different places in the exhibitions. The language and the way of speaking about women in the exhibitions often differed from how the men were presented. It also became clear that there were few items related to women in the exhibitions. Based on how women are represented in the exhibitions, one can conclude that museums are part of the gender system as maintainers and co-creators