Queer Natures: Animals, Environment and Modern Sexual Knowledge Production (1860s to 1930s and today)

This project investigates how German-language artists, scientists and writers (1860s-1930s) mobilised knowledge about non-human animals and their natural environment to create new ideas about the place of LGBTQ+ people in a fair society. In the 1920s, the famous German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld used butterfly experiments as evidence in attempts to decriminalise homosexuality. At the same time, the controversial writer Hanns Heinz Ewers rejected bourgeois sexual morality from the vantage point of ants. These texts were the first to fall victim to the infamous Nazi book burnings of 1933, because they presented radical action and practice about gender politics, from the decriminalisation of homosexuality to the recognition of transgender subjects. They were by no means non-tendentious: they questioned respectability and morality, but were often entangled with racist and antisemitic ideas about what German society should look like and who it should in-or exclude. Importantly, as I argue in this project, artists, scientists and writers were able to discuss sexual politics in complex and highly politicised ways by drawing on knowledge about non-human worlds. The organisation of the natural world, from reproduction to social structures, inspired complex and contradictory models for human society.

Today, this entanglement of gender politics and environmental practice is highly topical and politicised. Right-wing populist movements, from Meloni's Brothers of Italy to the Alternative for Germany, reject gender and environmental politics as part and parcel of progressive politics. At the same time, Kew Gardens, the world's largest botanical garden, currently celebrates 'the diversity and beauty of plants' in its major exhibition Queer Nature. As divisive as it can be uniting, the entanglement of queerness and nature is fuelling urgent social and political debates. My project investigates how a unique and turbulent moment in German history can inform and inspire our thinking today about gender politics, species loss and the politicisation of climate change, and how we need to think these together to articulate fair and just models for a future on our planet. It does so by (1) unearthing new and unseen archival material, from Ewers' seductive spiders to Kurt Finkenrath's 'hermaphroditic' slugs, to outline how artists, scientists and writers articulated and debated models of just societies by drawing knowledge from non-human worlds. (2) My expertise in languages, cultures and societies with focus on the history of German sexuality will enable me to develop a cross-cultural perspective on the role of the non-human for sexual politics and make this accessible to an Anglophone public. (3) I will collaborate with cutting-edge artists (writers, comedians, dancers) and LGBTQ+ community organisations (hiking club, pole dance studio, artist studio) to generate critical-creative methods for co-producing research with LGBTQ+ publics, which are under-represented in environmental scholarship and engagement. The project will have wide impact and benefits by catalysing my career as an expert in critical-creative practice that transforms research in modern languages and cultures; by accelerating careers of artists through involvement in the co-production of research; and by empowering partner organisations and communities to become vocal about gender and environmental politics.