Rhetoric of “Bearded Women,” Passing, and Trespassing Gender in Iran: Communicating Agency Against Gender Segregation

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the “Bearded Girls,” a phenomenon enjoying the spotlight in Iran's news media during 2016-2020. Bearded Girls is a nickname given by news and social media to women who disguise themselves as men to attend football matches in Iran since women were prohibited from entering stadiums. I explore the following questions: 1) What historical, contextual environment contributed to the production of the phenomena of Bearded Girls but also legitimizing them and turning their presence in stadiums into a public problem between 2016- 2020? 2) What cross-dressing meant to the women who used it to watch their favorite teams’ football matches, with what implication for Iran’s society? 3) What were the rhetorical implications of #BlueGirl, one of the Bearded Girls named Sahar Khodayari, who committed public suicide in front of the court after being arrested by police and was set for trial for her attempt to trespass stadiums?

By utilizing Gusfield’s concept of Public Problems, Butler’s theories of Gender Performativity and Undoing Gender, and Burke’s theory of Symbols as formative, I argue that Bearded Girls are the product of the structural constraints in a situation where none of the legitimized rhetorical conventions work within the traditional frameworks in Iran’s public sphere to open the doors to women. A group of women rights activists pursued their demands by recruiting non-state international actors such as FIFA and AFC to leverage their power in the equilibrium of power relations over the topic of women in stadiums, while Bearded Girls utilized passing as the means to reach their goal of watching games in stadiums. For Bearded Girls, gender passing has been their sole effective method of viewing football events from the stadium. Nevertheless, the majority of Bearded Girls voiced dislike of transvestism and viewed it only as a necessary evil to help them reach their goals. They demonstrated agency by removing obstacles by utilizing their bodies but even further using both bodies and words to find a place in the public sphere and be heard by society. Thus, the implication of Bearded Girls in Iran was not so much about breaking down traditional gender norms but rather introducing an inclusive way of expressing gender in which a female body could be a spectator of sporting events like football matches.

The Bearded Girls is an instance of resistance in asymmetrical power relations in a country in which citizens have to be creative to find a way to remove obstacles the state put into regulating and disciplining their bodies. The strategies citizens choose under the circumstances might be extraordinary or have different meanings in other contexts. What matters is to analyze those performances in the historical and cultural context of the subject while also paying attention to the outcomes and consequences of those strategies in that specific context.

Meanwhile, the symbolic effect of the #BlueGirl pushed the resistance further by destroying the body set for rigid regulations in public spaces. Sahar’s body burned in fire became a symbol of “the saint dying in neglect,” an innocent woman who only pursued a simple, fundamental right taken away from her. They saw her death as protesting the injustice. By destroying her life in public, she would destroy the laws on gender discrimination. On the other side, Sahar’s public suicide led to a shift in the rhetoric of some conservative state media, accepting women as a legitimate rhetorical audience for whom prohibiting stadiums is unjustified. The group shifted its rhetoric by turning the presence of women in stadiums from negative to neutral or positive.