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

Summary/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 physicalwellbeing. Widely regarded as a practice ‘for all’, yoga questions the authority of norms andpractices produced by institutionalised religions, Western biomedicine and sports, tracing thefoundations 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 perspectiveon contemporary yoga. By inscribing itself in a seemingly countercultural ethics ofand 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 participatesin tracing corporeal, spatial, social and cultural boundaries. Feminist reflections on corporealitycan unravel the workings of power exercised by and upon bodies, calling into questionthe very processes through which they operate in contemporary yoga practices. Crucial tothis approach is the tension between the fixity of corporeal normativity and the experience ofmovement, change and transformation that underscores the practice of yoga.

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