What is Critical Yoga Studies?: Gender, Health, and Cross-Cultural Consumption of Yoga in Contemporary North America

This feminist ethnography of contemporary yoga communities in North America represents my exploration of inequalities in the yoga world. Through conversations about how we experience our bodies, our abilities, and social locations, I ask questions about inclusion and exclusion, body normativity, and authenticity. Yoga offers an intersectional lens through which to examine and shift intersecting inequalities not only in the yoga studio, but in the health and fitness milieu as well. Key questions examine the factors that have led to the dominance of white, able bodied women in yoga. What makes yoga, yoga? How do we know what we are doing as yoga students is authentic, and what marks authenticity in a diverse climate of hybridity and transnational cultural exchange? This dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary yoga practitioners take up the issues of identity in yoga sites, particularly with regard to race, gender, embodiment, and class. It asks, how are ideological gender norms and embodiment produced and reproduced in North American yoga communities, and how do practitioners resist or conform to them? Multi-site ethnography is the central research method. The fieldwork consisted of participant observation in yoga classes, one-on-one interviews with yoga teachers and students, a participatory action research group, and discourse analysis of social media conversations about yoga. As the dissertation takes up questions around race and authenticity in yoga, the Race and Yoga Conference in Oakland, California was an important site of investigation. Research results showed that yoga in North America is not a unified practice, despite much debate as to what is considered valid and authentic in terms of what people think is the real yoga. Yoga is not a monolithic entity, and many approaches to yoga can function for those committed to social justice. The thesis also concludes that accessibility in yoga is multivalent, because people consider access to yoga in a variety of ways. Affordable yoga classes are great, but if people with disabilities can not get up the stairs to the studio, they miss out. Intersectional feminism in yoga is one powerful way to address these issues.