Visitor‐I and dual worldmaking: Queer museology between Tuntenhaus and the Schwules Museum

Abstract

This article develops the visitor‐I as an embodied protocol for analyzing how queer archival exhibitions choreograph perception, affect, and learning, and it uses dual worldmaking as a bounded heuristic to name the relation between lived worldmaking in the Tuntenhaus squat and curatorial worldmaking in the museum, and I argue that the visitor's interpretation forms a third, dependent mode that emerges within these conditions. Drawing on fieldnotes from a visit to the exhibition “Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: Gay Communism's Short Summer” in Schwules Museum, Berlin, I examine how ephemera (flyers, letters, testimonies, photographs, and domestic remnants) are reassembled into an environment that visitors must move through rather than simply read. I show how curatorial choices translate these materials into an archive of feelings that holds precarious care, threat, and intimacy as co‐present registers. By making curatorial agency and its limits explicit, and by articulating the visitor‐I as a situated protocol, the article contributes to queer museology and sensory anthropology with a practice‐based account of how exhibitions built from community archives organize affective and epistemic encounters.