Docile Bodies or Resistant Bodies? Tracing Power Dynamics in Elite Iranian Muslim Sportswomen's Experiences

Abstract

This dissertation examines how power operates through mechanisms of regulation, normalization, moral governance, and resistance in shaping the lived experiences, ethical subjectivities, and professional identities of Iranian elite sportswomen. This research addresses a significant gap in understanding how relations of power are exercised and experienced within the elite sport system of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While Iranian sportswomen have gained increasing international visibility, existing scholarship has often overlooked the institutional, religious and moral conditions through which this visibility is produced and regulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptualizations of sovereign power, disciplinary power, biopower, pastoral power, and ethics, this dissertation conceptualizes elite sport in Iran not simply as an athletic field, but as gendered site of state governance. This research is based on semi-structured interviews with 26 Iranian elite sportswomen, coaches, and referees and consists of four interconnected articles examining different dimensions of the Iranian elite sport system. The findings demonstrate that elite sport in the Islamic Republic of Iran operates through overlapping regimes of surveillance, religious regulation, and moral governance that extend beyond athletic performance into athletes’ bodies, conduct, visibility, and private lives. Women athletes emerge not only as competitors, but also as symbolic carriers of religious and Islamic Republic values whose legitimacy remains conditional upon conformity to dominant gendered expectations. Surveillance operates through institutional monitoring, digital observation, interpersonal relations, and self-regulation, producing athletes who continuously negotiate the boundaries of visibility, intelligibility, and participation. The dissertation further shows that women are not merely passive subjects of domination. Rather, they engage in ongoing practices of strategic compliance, concealment, selective visibility, silence, and resistance in order to sustain participation within restrictive conditions. Resistance emerges not outside power, but within the very relations through which elite sportswomen are governed. Policies such as mandatory hijab and sex segregation, often framed through discourses of protection and morality, function simultaneously as technologies of discipline and control that reorganize vulnerability while obscuring institutional accountability. Within this context, silence frequently becomes a necessary strategy of survival and increases the likelihood of exposure to sexual exploitation during training sessions and competitions. The dissertation also demonstrates how ethical subject formation differs across generations of Iranian elite sportswomen. While the earlier “lost generation” experienced exclusion, erasure, and withdrawal from elite sport, the contemporary “conditional generation” encounters forms of regulated inclusion in which participation depends upon conformity to prescribed moral and ideological norms. Across both generations, compliance often reflects negotiation, survival, and aspiration rather than moral alignment with dominant norms. Returning to Foucault’s metaphor of theory as a toolbox, this dissertation mobilizes Foucauldian concepts not as a closed explanatory system, but as analytical tools for interrogating how power, surveillance, and moral regulation shape women’s participation in elite sport. The analysis unsettles taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding visibility, participation, protection, and resistance, demonstrating how practices such as silence, strategic compliance, and negotiated visibility emerge as conditions of possibility within structured relations of power, while simultaneously challenging dominant assumptions regarding neutrality, autonomy, and safeguarding within elite sport.