Steiner, KristinaKristinaSteiner2025-12-012025-12-012025978-3-98989-055-8https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/111817Throughout the history of mankind, sports have primarily been considered an allmale sphere with women pushed to the sidelines. If women were to seriously participate in athletics, they were ultimately considered deviant since they acted against their “natural female development” (Colker and Widom 48). Based on the common belief that the ‘weaker sex’ should not exhaust itself by bodily work or physical exercise to sustain health for childbearing and motherhood, a powerful form of biological sexism was consolidated that inhibited female representation and participation in sports for years to come. Although developments in women’s rights and feminism during the last two centuries have caused this sexist ideology to become more peripheral, women today remain underrepresented in disciplines typically considered ‘masculine’. This paper explores the (lack of) female representation and diversity in male-dominated sports, focusing on competitive chess as represented in Walter Tevis’s The Queen's Gambit (1983). The themes of discrimination and marginalisation are central to this examination, as demonstrated by a closer look at the female protagonist, Beth Harmon, and her experiences as a young professional chess player. Reflecting on and incorporating real-world challenges such as patriarchal power structures and misogyny in sports, this paper finds that Tevis’s novel does not allow a female professional to prevail without major setbacks and obstacles. It shows a female athlete who is severely inhibited by numerous strokes of fate, fuelled by drug abuse, isolation and self-hatred. Moreover, it seems that excelling in a ‘male sphere’ such as competitive chess is integral in forming Beth’s deviant femininity which, in turn, threatens the traditional patriarchal system and thus leads to her being punished through mechanisms of ostracism and self-destruction.engCompetitive chessdiscriminationdiversityfemininitymale-dominated sportssex differencesThe Queen’s Gambit810bookpart