The Body of Yoga: A Feminist Perspective on Corporeal Boundaries in Contemporary Yoga Practice

Emanuela  Mangiarotti

doi:10.25038/am.v0i18.294

Authors

Emanuela Mangiarotti

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.294

Keywords:

yoga, body, corporeal boundaries, feminist theory, materialisation, affect theory

Abstract

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 paper

How 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

Author Biography

Emanuela Mangiarotti

Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione, Università degli Studi di Genova
Italy

Emanuela Mangiarotti is a researcher based in Genoa, Italy. She received her PhD in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies. She has spent several years conducting research, teaching and writing on gender, communal conflicts and Indian politics and society. Her current research project focuses on the practice of contemporary yoga and the politics of the yoga body. She is a faculty member of the Master academic program in Africa and Asia Studies and of the Master academic program in Gender, Migration and Integration Policies at the University of Pavia, Italy.

References

Ahmed, Sara. “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15, 1 (2008): 23–39. doi: 10.1177/1350506807084854 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506807084854

Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Psychology Press, 2000.

Al-Chamali, Gabriella Cella. Il grande libro dello yoga: L’equilibrio di corpo e mente attraverso gli insegnamente dello yoga Ratna. Milano: Rizzoli, 2010.

Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/0195137345.001.0001

Askegaard, Søren, and Giana M. Eckhardt. “Glocal Yoga: Re-Appropriation in the Indian Consumptionscape.” Marketing Theory 12, 1 (2012): 45–60. doi: 10.1177/1470593111424180. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593111424180

Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28, 3 (2003): 801–31. doi: 10.1086/345321. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/345321

Barcan, Ruth. Complementary and Alternative Medicine : Bodies, Therapies, Senses. Oxford, New York : Berg, 2011.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury, 129–54. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Birke, Lynda I. A. Feminism and the Biological Body. New Brunswick, NJ, London: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Psychology Press, 1993.

Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.11515701.0001.001

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Hall, Kim Q. Feminist Disability Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, 3 (1988): 575–99. doi: 10.2307/3178066. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Jaggar, Alison M., and Susan Bordo. Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. New Brunswick, NJ, London: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Jain, Andrea. Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199390236.001.0001

Katrak, Ketu H. Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. New Brunswick, NJ, London: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

McKinley, Nita Mary. “Feminist Consciousness and Objectified Body Consciousness.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 35, 4 (2011): 684–88. doi: 10.1177/0361684311428137. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684311428137

Miller, Amara Lindsay. “Eating the Other Yogi: Kathryn Budig, the Yoga Industrial Complex, and the Appropriation of Body Positivity.” Race and Yoga 1, 1 (2016). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t4362b9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5070/R311028507

Price, Janet, and Margrit Shildrick. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315094106

Puri, Jyoti. Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203906620

Shildrick, Margrit, and Janet Price. Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Bio/Logical Body. Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

Squarcini, Federico, and Luca Mori. Yoga: fra storia, salute e mercato. Roma: Carocci, 2008.

Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203699003

Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/0195161920.001.0001

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.294 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.294