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, little attention 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 queer and trans yoga.

Contemporary public discourses in the United States about the “war on terror” are pervaded by cultural discourses of human-animal intimacy set in contexts of nationalism, humanitarianism and militarism: specifically discourses of American “puppy love” and Middle Eastern “hatred of dogs.” These two intimately interconnected discourses work to shift boundaries between human and animal: one set of discourses dehumanizes everyone positioned as potential “terrorists”—including people in Iraq and Afghanistan figured as “enemy others”; the other set of discourses humanizes military working dogs and dogs adopted from Iraq and Afghanistan. Considering these discourses together highlights how the boundary between human and animal is unstable and intimately connected to gendered and sexualized processes of racialization deployed for political purposes. The shifting value ascribed to some dogs’ lives in the “war on terror” emerges at the nexus of the racialized, gendered and sexualized discourses of human exceptionalism and orientalism, working to iteratively reproduce unstable boundaries.