Leiden University Student Repository

Meijer, Kim (2024)

Where Are the Queens On the Board? Gender in Chess

Bachelor thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (BSc)

This thesis is an exploration of gender and gender categorization in chess. A sport that is different from most others in that it is a game of the brain rather than the physical moving body. However, this sport does see many gender inequalities, categorizations and excluding regulations also prevalent in other sports. Incorporating the stories of some of the most well known female chess players, transgender athletes and my own experiences and putting them in discussion with anthropological gender theory. This thesis argues that due to gender binary and gender essentialist notions we exclude people and keep gender differences alive even if they have no biological reason to. In doing so, I will follow and try to answer the guiding question; How does chess categorization expose our notions of gender in sport? I conclude with a note that chess could show a world in which we rethink the position and importance of gender in sport and look at other forms of categorization.

Chess

Gender

Gender Categorization

Sport

Transgender

Author

Meijer, Kim

Faculty

Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences

Specialisation

Anthropology of Gender

Supervisors

Moretti, I.

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en