This article interrogates the intersecting marginalities of Czech literature and queer writing, reframing their position within the contested category of “minor literatures.” Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of littérature mineure from Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (1975), it argues that “minor” should not be understood as merely peripheral or subordinate but as a site of aesthetic, political, and affective subversion. Revisiting the genealogy of the term––its translation history, its geopolitical implications, and its critical reception––the article highlights how “minor” is charged with questions of power, dependency, and epistemic difference. This framework is reinterpreted through a queer theoretical lens, emphasizing sexuality, embodiment, and affect, dimensions largely absent from Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka. The analysis positions Kafka not only as a linguistic or ethnocultural outsider but as a figure whose erotic ambivalence, bodily anxiety, and aesthetics of shame destabilize heteronormative, bureaucratic, and nationalist orders.
By situating Czech queer and queer-adjacent writers, such as Richard Weiner, Jiří Mordechai Langer, Otokar Březina, and Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, within this theoretical constellation, the article demonstrates that Czech “minor literature” serves as a space of deterritorialization that is linguistic, sexual, and spiritual. These authors enact queer opacity, coded homoeroticism, mystical reconfigurations of identity, and decadent hypervisibility, thereby refusing assimilation into dominant aesthetic, sexual, and national paradigms. The article concludes that “minor” should be read not as a deficit but as a generative modality that resists universalization, dramatizes estrangement, and enables the formation of alternative collectivities. In doing so, it reclaims the queer potential of minor literature as a textual commons for the displaced, the migrant, and the queer, linking early twentieth-century Czech modernism to contemporary theories of nomadic subjectivity, queer temporality, and non-sovereign literary space.
