The Teaching And Practice Of The “Yoga Body”: A Poststructural, Queercrip Analysis Of Yoga Education In The United States

The purpose of my study is to reveal and deconstruct the relations of power and dominant discourses about health and embodiment in the field of yoga education in the United States. In this post-qualitative inquiry, I employ poststructural concepts of power, discourse, and subjectivity as well as the work of theorists at the intersection of queer theory and disability studies (queercrip theory). Using a thinking with theory approach (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), I think poststructuralism and queercrip theory with a complex collection of texts, including yoga teacher training curriculum, scientific research into yoga’s effectiveness, media representations such as Yoga Journal, and my own embodied experiences. In thinking with all of these texts, I reveal how relations of power within yoga education contribute to an image of a “yoga body” – a healthy, able, gendered, pure, and moral body undertaking a physical practice for the control of individual health. I also consider how yoga teachers shape their own subjectivities in response to the discourse about this “yoga body.” Finally, I consider how my own embodiment and that of other queer and disabled yoga teachers and practitioners can resist these dominant discourses, opening up possibilities for how we think, teach, and practice yoga.