Discourse Analysis of Iranian Women Fans of Football

Sociological analysis of sport has emphasized the gender strains governing this social phenomenon adequately. With this approach, "football fanaticism" for women in a situation where direct presence and watching are prohibited in the stadiums as a "social issue" needs to be analyzed in this paper. Objective: Identifying the dominant gender hierarchy in the discourse of football fanaticism in Iran and, in a sense, identifying, describing, understanding and interpreting the discourses that exist in relation to the issue of "women's advocacy of football".

In terms of the nature of the research, this is a qualitative research based on text analysis. The analytical framework governing the research data in this article is the theory of discourse analysis by Laclau and Mouff. Under this framework, data from interviews, reports, opinions and, in general, any text related to the subject of research using the non-probabilistic sampling method and the theoretical sampling strategy being purposeful was analyzed from texts related to women's support for football and the presence of women at the stadiums. The Unit of Analysis was "Discourse" and its observation was the "Text". Selected texts were from website Bartarinha, Asre Iran, Puyesh, Khabar Online, Parsineh, Tabnak, Hamseda, Cup, The Instagram page of Taraneh Alidousti and Hanieh (one of the female supporters who came to the stadium).

The results of the research led to three levels of identification of religious-political, international and discourses available in the civil domain.