The depiction of liminality in Christa Wolf’s ‘Self-Experiment’

Abstract

Christa Wolf’s short story ‘Selbstversuch’ depicts how the protagonist goes through a sex-change transformation from female to male and, in a liminal status, reflects upon various social expectations of different genders. In this way, Wolf explores gender issues in East Germany, which in her earlier novels, such as Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), was already a major theme and later demonstrates itself in a more sophisticated way in her other novels. This article examines through the lens of liminality the relationship between gender identities and the socialist society of the German Democratic Republic. Through engaging with Wolf’s critique of binary thinking, this article highlights Wolf’s deep-seated socialist and humanist view of gender relations and her implication that an alternative mode of collaboration between the sexes to that based on a male-dominated gendered social system is needed.