Iranian Women, Inside or Outside of the Stadium? An Anthropological Study on Female Representation of National Identity in Iran

Abstract

A controversial and comprehensive debate that has resulted in numerous discursive clashes in Iran pertains to the presence of women at stadiums during male soccer matches. Different discourse systems have expressed their own contradictory and opposite stances in terms of whether Iranian women have the right to attend such events inside or outside the stadium, ranging from different notions of ritual pollution and moral threats to gender equality and women rights in public spheres and spaces. When the debate is considered more in depth, a question arises about the female representation of national identity in Iran: What is the status and role of the female body in symbolic demonstration of the national body of Iranian society as a kind of social body? It seems that there is a discursive debate about the symbolic representation of female body in public sphere in Iran. To provide further insight into this question, ethnographic methods, participant observations and different models of interviews (focus and nominal interviews) were employed in the fields and cultural areas under study. The purpose of this article is to examine the systems of discourses about the allowance or prohibition of the presence of women at soccer stadiums and the cultural foundations and backgrounds that have given shape to these discourses over recent decades.