My academic life has been on the move. Movements across disciplinary, geographical and societal boundaries have been central to my subjective experience of relocating to and navigating different academic spaces. This essay reflects on how the effort to re-integrate into the university in Italy has been chiefly defined by my identity as a homecoming Italian female researcher and how moving back has made me radically aware of how gender marks endemic precarity within Italian academia. The narrative also touches upon empowering moments of participating in networks where situating the subjective experience of gendered precarity translates into collective efforts to create alternative academic spaces and practices of care and mutual recognition.

The practice of yoga has grown globally in the past 20 years, with professionals, publications and practitioners furthering it as a way to improve physical and mental health, reduce stress, lead a more conscious and productive life and experience mental and physical wellbeing. Widely regarded as a practice ‘for all’, yoga questions the authority of norms and practices produced by institutionalised religions, Western biomedicine and sports, tracing the foundations of a personal and collective politics of the body. This discourse of accessibility – integral to the way yoga is marketed today – is the point of departure for a sociological perspective on contemporary yoga. By inscribing itself in a seemingly countercultural ethics of and from the body, yoga is entangled in the relations of power in which bodies are immersed. In that respect, gendered configurations are crucial to the way the body of yoga participates in tracing corporeal, spatial, social and cultural boundaries. Feminist reflections on corporeality can unravel the workings of power exercised by and upon bodies, calling into question the very processes through which they operate in contemporary yoga practices. Crucial to this approach is the tension between the fixity of corporeal normativity and the experience of movement, change and transformation that underscores the practice of yoga.Article received: December 16, 2018; Article accepted: January 23, 2019; Published online: April 15, 2019; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Mangiarotti, Emanuela. "The Body of Yoga: A Feminist Perspective on Corporeal Boundaries in Contemporary Yoga Practice." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 18 (2019): 79–88. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i18.294

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Against a background of neoliberal precarity, the yoga industry promotes a practice experienced by, and inscribed on, the body that is meant to transcend physiological boundaries and expand individual and collective awareness. In this context, research on contemporary yoga has shed light on how women, and specific notions of womanhood, are key to a promise of wellness, healing, and self-realisation that is materialised by White, monied, slender female practitioners as embodiments of the proper way of undertaking self-care. The yoga industry, thus, participates in a politics of the body, embedded in the intricate structures of the current neoliberal politico-economic regime. Based on these observations, this article sets out to interrogate how the yoga industry’s mandate of tending to the body enters the way female teachers and practitioners navigate, experience, and express their journey into yoga. By analysing selected interviews conducted with women yoga instructors and practitioners in the city of Genoa, the article examines how they frame yoga as a way of caring for the self while navigating personal issues and bodily ailments. As a path of self-scrutiny and self-realisation, yoga is talked about as providing some relief from life’s predicaments and embodied vulnerabilities while also accommodating gender normativity. The article develops a critique of the problematic appropriation of self-care by the yoga industry’s mainstream cultural repertoires as a sociologically neutral individual response to living with neoliberal precarity. The article contends that feminist politics of care provide a framework to re-inscribe yogic self-care within a broader process of collectively subverting neoliberal injunctions about tending to the body.

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