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Abstract
The paper examines football as a site of social contestation for Iranian women. The recent political controversy regarding women's attendance at football matches is indicative of this social conflict. I start by contextualizing this episode within a feminist framework of analysis. I then look at the development of Iranian women's participation in football as rioters, fans, players, referees, coaches, sports-writers and administrators of the game. Examples of women footballers from other cultures are provided in order to foreground commonalities and differences. Finally, I demonstrate how this movement is catalysng both Iranian feminism and the wider working-class social movement confronting the mullah-bourgeoisie.
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Acknowledgements
Ian Parker and Rebecca Lawthom (Discourse Unit, Manchester Metropolitan University) read and commented on earlier versions of this paper. The author is grateful for their advice. The article also benefited from comments by the anonymous reviewers at Cultural Studies.
Notes
1. I concede that the boundaries and functioning of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres are different in contemporary Iran compared to Europe and the US (cf. Ayubi Citation1995). The public space seems to be far more tightly controlled, moralistic and ritualistic in Iran and the private sphere is defined by Islamic authorities not in terms of a ‘free’ privatized realm of conscience but as ‘what is left over after the public is defined’ (Tajbakhsh Citation2003, p. 876). Having said this, it is my contention that in Iran sport plays a similar role to some newspapers and internet websites in pushing back certain taboos by making public what was private. In a society based on monologic morality and a vast distance between the private and public this move is rightly perceived as a threat to the regime's very existence (cf. Abdo Citation2003).
2. There are two interrelated issues here. First, sport provides an opportunity for what the feminist Gayle Rubin has called homosocial relationships (cf. Rubin Citation1975, Sedgwick Citation1985). These refer to same-sex relationships that may be charged with eroticism but not necessarily sexual. Contemporary Iranian sporting life would be an example. Another example would be the all-male world of knightly life in medieval culture. These homosocial spheres, especially the all-male ones, connect same-sex people in ways that are empowering at the expense of the outsiders. The tendencies of corporate executives to fraternize with and promote other men is a manifestation of homosocial relations. Second, sport also provides an opportunity for both homosexual and heterosexual relations to develop in relative ‘freedom’ from the surveillance apparatus set up to limit sexual liaisons. My position is that Iranian sporting life has always been one of the most liberated and permissive spheres of activity. Under the Islamic Republic and with the imposition of a puritanical view of sexual interaction, this trend has been accentuated. What is interesting is how this relatively liberated regime of gestures, bodily contact and sexual liaison is now percolating into the sporting sub-culture of fans. Carnivals are the perfect autonomous zones for the expression of these tendencies.
3. Naficy (Citation1999, p. 53) reminds us that in the Islamic system of looking ‘the eyes are not passive organs like ears … eyes are active, even invasive organs, whose gaze is also construed to be inherently aggressive’. An extreme version of this notion was expressed by Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, ‘Looking is rape by means of the eyes … whether the vulva admits or rejects it, that is, whether actual intercourse takes place or not’ (quoted in Naficy Citation1999, p. 54). It is, therefore, understandable how unashamed gazing becomes a threat to such a worldview.
