Instagram as a tool of ‘social navigation’: women’s soccer in the Islamic Republic of Iran - between censorship and (r)evolution

ABSTRACTFrom the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Instagram has proven to be a very relevant source of information about Iranian women’s soccer. The growing popularity of female professional football players, particularly members of the national team, tends to make their discourse particularly audible, reaching thousands of people on issues that concern discrimination against the Iranian female population in general as well as inequalities of treatment between men and women. By investing a male-dominated domain such as football and by imposing their voice, presence and visibility on the digital space, female football players tend to challenge the authority of the Iranian State in a spontaneous, sustained, original and unorganized way. The main obstacle to the development of the discipline is defined, following the testimonies described in this article, as the lack of media visibility of women’s soccer in the traditional media. This is not unique to Iran, as I explain, but linked to a political strategy to regulate the visibility of women, especially the female body, in the public space. I chose to use the theoretical tool of social navigation to provide an understanding of the discourses and actions of resistance implemented by various female players, especially on Instagram. All of these social agents operate in a non-democratic socio-political environment and acting under particular circumstances. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Fozooni, Iranian Women and Football.2. Arbaeen is a commemoration that marks the end of mourning for Imam Hossein, a central figure in Shiism.3. In 2015 the first edition of the Asian Futsal Championship was held. I was in Iran at the time and the victory of the women’s futsal team did not receive any media attention or communication from the Ministry of Sports and the Football Federation at the time. According to several testimonies of female futsal players collected on Instagram in May 2020, the Iranian Football Federation took two years to pay the amount due to the national.team following its second consecutive victory in the 2018 Asian Cup.4. “Iran Ranked World’s 7th Instagram User”.5. “Events in Iran since Mahsa Amini’s arrest and death in custody”.6. Some of them have between 40,000 and 300,000 subscribers. In some cases, this number has increased dramatically following Iran’s qualification for the 2022 Asian Cup. In addition, the profile of Team Melli goalkeeper Zohre Koudaei (who is not particularly active, based on the frequency of her posts) saw the number of subscribers rise from some 1,000 to over 50,000 in the space of several days following the complaint filed on 15 November 2021 by the Jordanian Football Association with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). See: https://english.alarabiya.net/sports/2021/11/15/Jordan-requests-gender-confirmation-of-Iran-player-after-loss-claims-goalie-is-a-man.7. See for example: Pfister, Fasting, Scraton, and Vazquez, “Women and Football – A Contradiction?”.8. Bromberger, “Sport, Football and Masculine Identity”; Mourao and Votre, “Women’s football in Brazil”; Knijik, “Feminities and masculinities in Brazilian women’s football: Resistance and compliance”; Nneme and Lacombe, “La construction de l’espace du football au féminin”; Pelak, “Women and gender in South African soccer”.9. Breuil, Histoire du football féminin en Europe.10. Hess, “For the Love of Sensation”; Williams, A Game for Rough Girls?; Fowler, “Sport and the Australian War Effort during the First World War”; Oriard, Reading Football, cited in Hess, “For the Love of Sensation”, 21; Prudhomme-Poncet, Histoire du football féminin au XXe siècle11. Williams, A Beautiful Game, 3.12. Foissard, “Les Femmes, la morale et les sports enIndochine (1900–1945)”; Koh, “Chains, challenges and changes”.13. Manzenreiter, “Football in the reconstruction of the gender order in Japan”.14. Shayegh, “Sport, Health, and the Iranian Middle Class in the 1920s and 1930s”.15. Tahami, “Etude de la typologie sexuée des sports en Iran”.16. Dong and Mangan, “Ascending then Descending?”.17. Packer, “Hors-jeu dans le football féminin au Sénégal”.18. Fozooni, “Iranian Women and Football”; Fozooni, “Religion, Politics and Class”.19. La participation de l’athlète marocaine Nawal El Moutawakel aux Jeux olympiques de Los Angeles en 1984 (elle remporte la médaille d’or du premier 400 mètres haies féminin de l’histoire des JO) est considérée comme l’événement à l’origine du débat sur la présence et les performances des athlètes arabes et/ou musulmanes aux compétitions sportives olympiques et internationales. Amara, “Veiled Women Athletes in the 2008 Beijing Olympics”.20. Fozooni, “Iranian Women and Football”.21. Chehabi, The Juggernaut of Globalization.22. https://footballdokht.ir/news/577-تاریخچه-فوتبال-زنان-در-ایران-عکس.html23. Such as Khadije Sepanji who was the first vice-president of the women’s section in the Iranian Football Federation, after serving as a consultant on women’s sports to the Tehran Municipality in 1998.24. Shahrokni, Women in Place.25. Football Under Cover, Ayat Najafi, Germany, 2006: https://youtu.be/YoB50U1Zcic26. While the men’s national futsal team is the most successful in Asia (12 titles since the championship’s inception in 1999), the women’s team has won both competitions organized since 2015 by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), beating Japan twice in 2015 (1–0) and 2018 (5–2). In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was the reason for the postponement of the championship to a later date, several female futsal players informed the public on social media, including Instagram, that the money earned from their last victory had not been paid to them by the Iranian Football Federation. The sum of 22 million toman (equivalent to $200 at the time) was finally distributed to each player at the end of the year, after two years of devaluation of the Iranian currency (a loss of almost 70%); some of them, like FarzanehTavasoli, felt that it was now worthless.27. FIFA, Women’s Football MA’s Survey Report 2019.28. Sohrabi-Haghighat, “New media and social-political change in Iran”.29. Golkar, “Student activism, social media, and authoritarian rule in Iran”.30. Bradley, Political Islam, Political Institutions and Civil Society in Iran.31. Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, Zittrain, and Haraszti, Access controlled.32. Akhavan, Electronic Iran.33. Golkar, “Student activism, social media, and authoritarian rule in Iran”.34. Shirazi, “Information and communication technology and women empowerment in Iran”; Gheytachi, “Iran’s reformist and activists: Internet exploiters”.35. Sohrabi-Haghighat and Mansouri, “Where is my vote?”.36. Khiabany and Sreberny, “Blogistan”.37. Akhavan, Exclusionary cartographies.38. Raunio, “Saving Muslim women in the era of Axis of Evil?”.39. Fadaee, Social movements in Iran.40. Some of them have between 10,000 and 300,000 subscribers, with the number of subscribers increasing particularly following Iran’s qualification for the 2022 Asian Cup.41. According to an official survey conducted by the Iranian news agencies Irna, Isna, Tasnim and Mehr, and published in an e-magazine dedicated to Iranian women’s football on 19 September 2020, women’s sports account for 1.1% of media coverage in Iran.42. Instagram was launched on 6 October 2010. See “Iran Ranked World’s 7th Instagram User”.43. Ragel, “Jafar Panahi”.44. Ibid.45. “Blogger may have been tortured to death in Iran jail”; “Iran detains seven people over blogger’s death”; “U.N/. experts ask Iran to explain blogger’s death in jail”.46. Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War.47. Vigh, “Motion squared”.48. Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War.49. Ibid., 14.50. Bleiker, Popular dissent, human agency and global politics.51. Lilja, Constructive Resistance.52. Paidar, Women and the Political Process in twentieth-century Iran.53. Direnberger, “De la rue à internet”.54. Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards.55. Lilja, Constructive Resistance. Repetitions, Emotions, and Time, 32.56. Ibid., 31.57. Lilja and Vinthagen, “Dispersed resistance”.58. Vinthagen and Johansson, “Everyday resistance”.