Decolonizing Yoga? and (Un)settling Social Justice

Wakpa, Tria Blu

doi:10.5070/r331042080

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Scholars interested in yoga as a site of social and political resistance often draw upon auto/ethnography. The journal Race and Yoga intentionally publishes work that showcases the experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous yoga scholar-practitioners (Berger, 2018; Blu Wakpa, 2018; Cameron, 2019; Hassan, 2020). Similarly, queer, self-proclaimed “accidental yoga scholars” draw on embodied politics in critiquing postcolonial localized yoga (Ballard et al, 2016).…”

Section: Possibilities Of Auto/ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Stretchy and Tense: A Diffractive Auto/Ethnography of Privilege With Yoga Pants

McKibben

2023

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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The contemporary yoga industry is entangled in many contradictions. While yoga is intended to be an inclusive, liberatory practice, its contemporary iterations enact exclusion through an industry that often privileges able-bodied, affluent, white women. As a yoga scholar-practitioner who embodies these identities, I am troubled by how my teaching and studies of yoga further replicate power imbalances. In this article, I interrogate privilege and power as they emerge with yoga pants. I draw upon Barad’s cutting together-apart in a diffractive auto/ethnography. I make literal cuts through the fabric of my yoga pants, as reflections, reactions, and interview transcripts make figurative cuts through self-image, body-image, and feminine norms. I consider how this methodology materializes an entanglement of affective forces, power, and critical feminist academia that is useful in exploring possibilities for change. This inquiry does not conclude, but rather acknowledges an imperfect and ever-evolving interrogation of embodied power as it shapes intellectual inquiry, and spaces of yoga practice.

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Section: Possibilities Of Auto/ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Stretchy and Tense: A Diffractive Auto/Ethnography of Privilege With Yoga Pants

McKibben

2023

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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“…Much recent critical research around yoga brings attention to how yoga often centers white middle-and upper-class women and reproduces imperial and settler colonial relationships of racial capitalism (Hassan 2020;Manigault-Bryant 2016;Putcha 2020). In addition, some recent scholarship analyzes how Black women, people of color, indigenous Native Americans, and South Asian peoples have found tools of resistance within yoga (Hagan 2021;Sood 2020;Ternikar 2021;Blu Wakpa 2018).…”

Section: Towards My Femme-inist Account Of Queer and Trans Yogamentioning

confidence: 99%

Queer and Trans Yoga: Practices of Utopia in Hostile Times

Diamond-Lenow

2023

Race and Yoga

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This article theorizes queer and trans yoga as a practice of queer utopia and embodied resistance to systems of subordination at a time of increased attacks on queer and trans life, rights, and freedom. While there is a growing robust literature that critiques the racialized gendered and colonialist formations of yoga in the West, few engagements beyond a few mainstream and scholarly monographs explore queer and trans yoga. This research contributes to this gap in developing an account of queer and trans yoga through autoethnography and testimony. It particularly emphasizes the potentials for cultivating pleasure in individual and collective terms through this queered practice.

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“… 17. See, for instance, issues of the academic journal Race and Yoga , the text by Berila et al (2016), as well as Blu Wakpa, (2018), Hagan (2021), Nair and Singh (2020), Strings and Blu Wakpa (2016), and Strings (2017). See also Haddix (2016) for a reflection on how online debates have opened up conversations about yoga and social justice.…”

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confidence: 99%

The politics of tending to the body: Women doing yoga in Genoa (Italy)

Mangiarotti

2022

European Journal of Women's Studies

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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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Decolonizing Yoga? and (Un)settling Social Justice

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Stretchy and Tense: A Diffractive Auto/Ethnography of Privilege With Yoga Pants

Stretchy and Tense: A Diffractive Auto/Ethnography of Privilege With Yoga Pants

Queer and Trans Yoga: Practices of Utopia in Hostile Times

The politics of tending to the body: Women doing yoga in Genoa (Italy)

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