Iranian elite sportswomen: Docile yet defiant bodies

This article examines how elite Iranian sportswomen are governed and constituted within a sex-segregated sport system shaped by religion, state surveillance, and regime representation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with elite athletes, coaches, and referees, the study uses a Foucauldian framework to analyze how technologies of power, including compulsory hijab, institutional monitoring, and symbolic national representation, regulate women's bodies, conduct, and visibility. Findings show that elite sportswomen are produced simultaneously as docile bodies and moral symbols of the Islamic Republic, while also internalizing disciplinary surveillance through practices of self-regulation and concealment. At the same time, women enact resistance through negotiation, covert defiance, reverse discourse, and, in some cases, overt refusal and exile. By centering elite sportswomen's narratives across multiple sporting roles, this study advances scholarship on surveillance, subjectivity and resistance in elite sport, offering new insight into how Muslim women navigate religious domination while actively reshaping their identities within and beyond restrictive state systems.