This dissertation investigates how scenes of speaking and listening relate to oppression and agency in Franz Kafka’s literature. This examination of performed speech and listening reveals how these situations subvert notions of gender, race, sexuality, humanness, and disability, an intersection of issues previously underappreciated in research on the writer. This analysis begins with the novella “In the Penal Colony” (1919), in which a researcher evaluates an execution process by listening to its oral defense. I argue that listening in this story is thought of as vulnerability, associated with femininity, and speaking is considered as potent dominance, associated with masculinity. The second chapter examines “Report to an Academy” (1917), wherein the narrator elaborates the process by which he, presumably an ape, gained human language in a speech to an academic audience. His speech subverts the academy’s investigation and the superiority of humanness. The third chapter demonstrates how performance and performative listening affirm otherness in “Josefine, the Singer” (1924). Written in first-person plural, the text features two audiences: those who gather for Josefine’s performance and the readers. These interdependent audiences highlight how listening can foster mutual exchange and destabilize oppressive norms. The fourth chapter analyzes “Cares of a Family Man” (1919), features a being who defies all norms, Odradek. I propose in this chapter that the narrator teaches the audience how to deeply listen to Odradek and leads readers to favor undecidability over normativity. The final chapter of this dissertation concludes with a comparison of James Baldwin’s “A Stranger in the Village” (1952) and The Castle (1926). I focus on contrasting figurations of alterity in these texts, represented through what they hear and how they are (and are not) heard. I underscore that both Baldwin and Kafka use snow to stand in for whiteness, an oppressive medium which otherwise silences their characters. Instead of representing subservience, I propose that listening illuminates scenes of performative social life and political refusal.