FIGHTING FOR WOMEN
Hoodfar’s book resonates
Homa Hoodfar launched her new book on women in sport Wednesday, almost a year late.
The Concordia University professor emeritus had finished the work, which focuses on how women fighting for their rights on the playing field extends into the political arena, in the run-up to the 2016 Olympics. She had hoped it would be timely and might contribute to the discussion about women in sport that would inevitably accompany the Rio Games.
But those plans were derailed when 65-year-old Hoodfar returned to her native Iran last winter to keep an eye on parliamentary elections there. As Montrealers will recall, she was arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, accused of “dabbling in feminism” and detained in the notorious Evin prison for 112 days. She was repeatedly interrogated, confined to a tiny cell and deprived of sleep.
Fortunately this dark chapter had a happy ending. After a difficult few months, Hoodfar was freed last fall, in large part due to a concerted campaign by her colleagues. The anthropologist, who holds Canadian, Irish and Iranian citizenship, returned home to Montreal. Her health was weakened by the ordeal, but her will and determination remain as strong as ever.
Hoodfar said in an interview this week that she initially thought she’d missed the opportunity to release the book, Women’s Sport as Politics in Muslim Contexts.
“But then my colleague at (Concordia’s) Simone de Beauvoir Institute said it’s never too late.”
With women’s struggles as relevant as ever, Hoodfar has put her original plans back in motion.
There are many parallels between the sports arena and the political sphere when it comes to women negotiating their rights, she said. In the Muslim world, which is Hoodfar’s area of expertise, women have often had to fight just to be able to participate in sports. In many cases they have experienced more success in these efforts than they have in pushing for political, legal or social reforms. But there has been spillover.
In Iran, she said, women pushed back against the notion that it was “un-Islamic” for them to play sports by arguing physical activity is a part of healthy living, “and taking care of health is everyone’s responsibility because health is a gift from God.” After flexing their muscle to win the right to engage in sports — though not with men — women then demanded and were granted their own games, which grew into a 16-nation competition.
But it’s not just elite athletes who are achieving gains, Hoodfar noted. Average women are organizing neighbourhood fitness classes, women are taking over corners of parks for activities and groups of women are going on hikes in the mountains.
“Women just decide and act upon it. Once a lot of women start doing it, the state has to accept it,” Hoodfar said. “Certainly women are not being granted more rights, they are demanding more rights. They are occupying space. They are making these spaces their own.”
Muslim women have also had to challenge sports federations to be able to compete, Hoodfar said. These battles have revolved around dress codes, from tennis’s requirement that female athletes wear short skirts to soccer’s longtime reticence to allow Muslim women to wear a hijab.
As Hoodfar’s attention is now turning to new projects, her work may have new resonance. Feminism is undergoing a reawakening in the West due to U.S. President Donald Trump rolling back women’s rights that had long been taken for granted.
“It’s a very hard lesson to learn, but I have watched this happen in Iran and Turkey and now it’s happening in North America,” she said.
Hoodfar had been planning to examine women in the electoral process when she went to Iran last year. But her experiences there have set her on a new path of discovery.
“I’m hoping to write up my first-hand research from Evin prison,” she says with a laugh. “It will be on the anthropology of interrogation.”