On the Usefulness of Researching Queer Natures by Ina Linge
As Project Lead for Queer Natures, I have the amazing opportunity to pursue my own research project within a broader creative team. In this blog post, I introduce my research focus and share some insights into how creative collaboration has opened up new findings and methods.
Thinking Queerness with Animals
In my research for Queer Natures, I am interested in finding out how German-language artists, scientists and writers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century tried to understand what it means to be LGBTQ+ – and how they did so by looking at animals for guidance and inspiration. During this period, radically new ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were produced in the German-speaking world by a wide range of experts, communities and individuals. Emerging sciences such as psychiatry, sexology and psychoanalysis discussed sickness and health in relation to sexuality. Literature, visual art and the new medium of film represented LGBTQ+ identities and shaped how they might be understood. LGBTQ+ communities gained some visibility and demanded rights and freedoms. I was already familiar with this context through my research for my book Queer Livability: German Sexual Science and Life Writing (2023). This explored how queer and trans autobiographical writers challenged the dominance of scientific models of gender and sexuality (you can download a free copy of this book here).
As I was researching and writing this book, I kept noticing curious references to animals. Sometimes, animals are used as metaphors for human and queer concerns. For example, in Tagebuch einer männlichen Braut (Diary of a Male Bride, 1907), the trans* narrator, Dori, talks about not wanting to be a “Herdentier”, an animal that lives in a flock. Dori uses this animal metaphor to emphasise that they are not someone who follows the crowd and their herd mentality that doesn’t question rigid gender expectations. Instead, Dori asserts themselves as an independent individual who can think and act for themselves. Other times, animal bodies and behaviour are used to highlight similarities between human and animal sex, gender and sexuality. For example, sexologists and geneticists in the 1920s considered research on so-called “intersex” butterflies to argue that sexual diversity is natural. Social reformers and LGBTQ+ activists then used this to argue for the decriminalisation of homosexuality (you can download my article on this topic for free here).
Ameison by Hanns Heinz Ewers
Queering Human and Ant Societies
For Queer Natures, I now get the chance to dig deeper into this topic, to trace how knowledge about animals was used to make a particular point about human gender and sexuality. These arguments are rarely just about gender identity or sexual desire, but tie into larger ideas about how societies should be organised and how diversity should be valued. Most recently, I have been interested in the ways in which ants and bees inspired creative and unusual thinking about reproduction and social organisation. During my period of study, ants and bees had drawn particular interest because they are “eusocial” animals, which means that they form complex social groups in which care labour is divided: only one (or a few) females can reproduce, but non-birthing parents take over the care of the young. Because of their ability to cooperate, ants and bees were often considered to hold up a mirror to human society. For example, if, like me, you grew up in 1990s Germany, you probably know the animated series Die Biene Maja (Maya the Bee). The series is based on the children’s book Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer (The Adventures of Maya the Bee), which was originally published in 1912 by Waldemar Bonsels. It tells the story of Maya, who abandons her hive in search for adventure but ultimately returns home to protect her hive. Bonsels was also an outspoken antisemite and later became a supporter of Nazi politics. Drawing comparisons between human and animal societies might show us how similar we are, but, as Bonsels example shows, it can also mean that animal behaviour is used to advocate for militarism and war amongst human societies.
But what does the social organisation of insects have to do with queer people? In Ameisen (Ants, 1925), ostensibly a natural history book about ants, German author Hanns Heinz Ewers interweaves scientific explanations of ant life with short stories in which humans increasingly become antlike in their (a)moral and sexual behaviour. In the book, the social behaviour of worker ants, who are hard-working but cannot reproduce, is offered as a parallel to queer humans. The argument, here, to state it very briefly, is that reproduction is not the only way to contribute to society. This alone might be a tempting argument, if viewed out of context. But the context is everything here: the short story presents a vision of a society where both reproductive and non-reproductive labour is done in the service of nationalism and colonial expansion. Queerness, here, is presented as natural, but only as long as queer people work towards upholding a strictly hierarchical nationalist state. This is hardly a lesson that will resonate with queer communities today.
The Pressure to Produce
During my research on this particular case study, regular conversations with the Queer Natures team helped me to uncover further aspects of this problematic work. For example, a strong theme that emerged for our team early on is the question of productivity. Whether we work in academia, comedy or television, all of us work under labour conditions that demand productivity. But this demand to produce outcomes often seems to override our ability to take care of our own health and wellbeing, and often actively causes feelings of stress, anxiety and burnout. The need to prove one’s value and worth through productivity is felt keenly in an underfunded culture and creative sector (see the State of the Arts report here). It is also felt by those of us who work in the humanities, a subject often wrongly sidelined as useless and bad value for money for students. The risk for burnout is also especially high for queer academics and creatives, who might draw on personal experience to produce work in an increasingly volatile political climate of increased violence and regressive legislation affecting LGBTQ+ people. When this intersects with other forms of discrimination, from racism to ableism, productivity might be driven by the pressure to advocate for change. Periods of rest and unproductiveness might feel like time lost or wasted. But as Trisha Hersey writes, rest is a social and racial justice issue. Rest is resistance.
These conversations about productivity, value, worth and usefulness today in turn helped me understand my research topic in a new way. In Ameisen, Ewers links queerness to value and usefulness. But as a result, queer acceptance is conditional. Rest and unproductiveness, in contrast, are presented as undesirable and disruptive to the state and nation. Diversity, here, is considered valuable only if it is productive and useful to the majority. We can see similarities to discussions today that critique institutional diversity initiatives for having lost their critical edge (see the work of intersectional feminist writer Sara Ahmed on this topic here). But at a time when public funding is rapidly withdrawn from EDI initiatives by the Trump administration in the US and beyond, showing the value of diversity is an urgent and life-threatening issue. Shortly after receiving funding for this project, an article appeared in a British tabloid paper that accused the government of “squandering” and “frittering” funds on project like ours, and other projects focusing on intersectionality and inclusion. Value and productiveness are weaponised to further entrench inequalities.
Productivity is politicised, both now and in the past. This insight gives our Queer Natures team a chance to reflect and experiment: To whom does our work have to be valuable? Who decides on the inherent value of our labour? Who sets the conditions under which we work? Are rest and productivity really that different? The Queer Natures project aims to open up a space for discussion about these and other questions. We are orientated towards process and method, community and exchange: we are interested in the puzzle of queerness and nature, and to see what kind of responses it might engender – wonder, humour, doubt, bewilderment, action, rest. That is why my avatar is an ant that is mid-rest. She might be taking a rest, but she is also reflecting on what rest means in a world that values productivity.