An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Ina Linge (Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellow, 2025)
Ants in Your Pants: Queer Ecology and Nationalism in Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Ameisen [The Ant People] (1925)
My AHRC-funded research project “Queer Natures” (2024-26) investigates how German-language artists, scientists and writers (1860s-1930s) mobilised knowledge about non-human animals and their environment to create new ideas about the place of LGBTQ+ people in society. In this work-in-progress talk, I present research from one of my chapters. Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Ameisen (1925), ostensibly a natural history book about ants, interweaves scientific explanations of the lives of ants with “myrmecomorphic” (ant-like) short stories, where humans increasingly become antlike in their (a)moral and erotic behaviour. In the 1920s, ants as eusocial animals that form complex colonies were often considered to hold up a mirror to human society. In my talk, I trace how Ameisen presents the social and productive (but not reproductive) behaviour of worker ants as parallel to that of queer humans, and how both are made to play a pivotal role in developing an understanding of (homo)nationalism across species boundaries. Ewers’ example thereby disrupts scholarship in queer ecology that draws on queer and ecological ways of thinking to establish more equitable and just futures. Ameisen, too, draws on queer and ecological ways of thinking, but ultimately ties these to fascist ideology. My talk therefore offers an intervention into the political surety of scholarship in queer ecology and suggests some ways to disturb this practice.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7