Iranian women's sports fandom : gender, resistance, and identity in the football movie offside

As sport enters new global territories, attending to questions of cultural difference is increasingly important to studies of women’s sports fanship. This article draws on theories of transnational feminism and feminist sports scholarship to contemplate the cinematic portrayal of the non-Western female football supporter. Women sports fans rarely appear as film protagonists, with the notable exception of the 2006 movie Offside, which tells the story of Iranian women soccer fans attending a World Cup qualifying match. By focusing on the ways that women fans negotiate their marginal status in the sporting arena, I argue that the film unsettles cultural associations between masculinity and football in Iran, and confounds the oppositional construction of the “other” woman as a passive victim of, or freedom fighter against, Islam.