Dr Ina Linge (University of Exeter) presents on 'Ants in Your Pants: Queerness, Nature 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 paper, I present research from one of my chapters. Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Ameisen [The Ant People] (1925), marketed as nature writing, 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. I argue that in Ameisen, the social and productive behaviour of ants is presented as parallel to that of queer humans, and both are made to play a pivotal role in developing an understanding of nationalism across species boundaries. Whereas reproductive roles and capabilities were often used to tie gender to specific social and political roles, queer people were often relegated to the realm of the non-reproductive and were thus understood to be antithetical to the nationalist project. Ameisen, however, draws on sexological knowledge to engage liberal, rights-based concerns for gender and sexual diversity and to activate a logic of productivity and usefulness as building blocks towards a nationalist model for the ethno-German nation state. This begs the question: What can ants really teach us about human society? And can we maybe give the ants a rest?

About the speaker

Dr Ina Linge is Senior Lecturer in German in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies at the University of Exeter. Her research in queer German studies, environmental humanities, and medical humanities investigates how and by whom sexual knowledge was created in early-twentieth-century Germany, and how this knowledge relates to larger political, cultural and social shifts. Publications include the monograph Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing (Michigan University Press, 2023), which explores the importance of queer and trans life writing for sexual knowledge production in early-twentieth-century Germany. Her recent work has explored the role of the non-human in sexual knowledge production: see for example an article on the role of butterfly experiments for German gay-rights activism and research in the 1920s (winner of the 2020 Women in German article prize), and a co-edited special issue on ‘Sex and Nature’ for Environmental Humanities. Forthcoming publications include the edited volume Weimar’s Queer Visual Cultures (Toronto University Press, 2026), co-edited with Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton.