I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that a quick Google search of “chess queen” would yield a surprising number of images of the sexualized female body. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. When I think of chess, sex doesn’t come to mind, though it may from here on out.

Amidst photos and renderings of the pieces themselves were anthropomorphized images like the one here and a striking number of images of breasts, bellies, and “sexy women” with chess paraphernalia. At first I thought, “Maybe there’s a chess fetish culture I’m not aware of.” So, for kicks, I googled “chess king” hoping to find some phallic renderings (or at least some idealized six-pack-abs carved in ebony and ivory) and “chess fetish” hoping to find some groovy alt-culture (Does an imaginary alien race count? See Wikipedia). But, my half-hearted “research” gave me the  usual pop-culture, hetero-centric breakdown: women’s bodies are sexy objects, even if those “bodies” are merely representational.

I don’t make it a practice of searching random phrases on the Internet, but I had just finished listening to Sean Phillips’ brief report on NPR, “A Gender Divide in the Ultimate Sport of the Mind,” which introduced  me to the gender segregated side of chess. There are women’s and men’s chess tournaments, along with some inter-sexed matches as well. There are also women’s titles, but it seems no men’s titles: i.e., You’re either a (male) Grandmaster or a Woman Grandmaster and the two are not equivalent.

While the report itself is fairly interesting, it got me thinking again about communities–specifically about the need for supportive communities of people who have common goals or interests. People need organizations made up of other people who understand something of what they are going through, and given that gender persists as a ubiquitous dividing line, it makes sense that women and men (and any other gender/sex identity) need the company of their own from time to time. Like chess pieces, where each type is played according to its own specific rules, people often seem very aware of the rules of their “kind.” Unlike chess pieces, however, people can decide to which groups they belong, can change groups at whim, can devise their own rules/methods for playing at Life.

At least, people should do these things. We should actively engage with our roles, choosing and refusing aspects so that we carve out our own identities. This kind of agency is difficult to grasp if you’re burdened with gender-identifying ranks and achievements, especially since  it is women’s ranks and achievements which bear the mark of difference. And, as many of us learned in primary school, different is often misinterpreted as less-than. The marking of difference extends past gender, too. Racial and ethnic minorities also often carry appended titles, usually in unofficial, private, dialogue or cases of national titles.

Labels, names, these things matter to me since they appear to impart knowledge beyond mere classification. Identifying a person as a WNBA player means something, and typically a lesser something, than identifying a person as an NBA player. I don’t identify myself as a woman graduate student, a woman instructor, or a woman friend, though I know people who identify themselves in such a way. For a few of them, gender markers combat insistence on hierarchy: all roles become gender labeled. There’s a beautiful logic to this–each role is identified so that none are assumed to better than others, just different. Still, I find the practice counterproductive since the whole world gets unnecessarily divided into either male/female, or,  for those friends of mine who are aware of others’ resistance to heterosexual labels, the world becomes unnecessarily sexed. (I realize my own impulse to seek out the objectified male equivalent during my initial search. I’m not above falling into the role of the agent of the gaze!)

In chess, every class of piece has its own job, it’s own rules to adhere to while on the job, and those rules are independent of gender, (though reliant instead upon social class). Though grossly outnumbered, the queen isn’t weakened during game play by her association with the feminine . . . she’s just another part of the game until off the board she’s sexed, or rather until idealized images of living women are crafted into objects of male fantasy, tools to be moved about or sacrificed for the eye/I of the god/player.

I may have to go back to playing checkers . . .