10 - Kafka and gender

Summary

Kafka configures gender roles in both familiar and unexpected ways. His characters, despite certain conformities with the stereotypes of his age, are in flux, calling to mind Otto Weininger's scale of masculinity and femininity. Gender boundaries in Kafka's writings of all periods are indistinct as are boundaries between species. For Kafka one is not born male or female, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one becomes one or the other or sometimes a mixture of the two.

As a recent critic has pointed out, his approach to gender was tied up closely with Jewish thinking on the subject. A close look at earlier and later works will reveal also that he did not revise his concepts of gender relations over time, contrary to Klaus Theweleit's assertion that by 1922 Kafka had achieved an understanding of women based on individuality, but rather that he 'de-essentialised' gender all along. Kafka derived gender models from a variety of sources all of which he approached in a critical, detached way. The diversity of the available models allowed him to recognize the relativity of each and, as Theweleit notes, to escape the exclusively heterosexual model which admits ‘only victors and victims . . . (not men and women)’.