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Race and Yoga

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About

Mainstream narratives about yoga in the U.S. often describe how the practice promotes physical and spiritual wellbeing. But, yoga practitioners and scholars rarely question who has had access to the practice since its arrival in North America, and thereby its purportedly healing and liberatory properties. Relatedly, they fail to critically interrogate the representation of the prototypical yogi in contemporary America: upper and middle-class white persons, particularly white women.

Race and Yoga is the first scholarly journal to examine issues surrounding the history, racialization, sex(ualization), and inclusivity (or lack thereof) of the yoga community.

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Articles

"You are Your Best Thing": The Barriers and Benefits of Yoga for Black Women

African American women face emotional stress and chronic health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. This has become even more salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a multitude of factors that contribute to this psychosocial stress and negative health outcomes including systemic oppression and barriers to physical activity. Exercise has been identified as an adaptive coping strategy for Black women to reduce psychological distress and negative health outcomes. This article will explore yoga as an adaptive intervention. Issues that impact Black women, Black women and physical activity, the benefits and barriers of yoga, and access for Black women will also be addressed. This article is aimed at two primary groups: 1) Black women who experience emotional stress and/or who have been diagnosed with or are at risk of conditions such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes that negatively impact their overall health and, 2) healthcare providers and supporters of these women.

Queer and Trans Yoga: Practices of Utopia in Hostile Times

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.

“Roll Out My Mat and Take Up Space”: A Study of Black Women’s Resistance to Yoga’s White Normativity

Yoga in the West, specifically in the United States, is often a deeply exclusionary space. While the practice of āsana, or posture with steady breathing, can be performed anywhere, the ability to engage in a full medicinal yoga practice may be unattainable for some practitioners, Black women in particular, due to how white normativity is bolstered in the US yoga industry. Contributing to the emergent literature that asks if the benefits of physical activity are universally shared by all people, this article discusses the historical and social contexts that influenced the whitening and gendering of US yoga and utilizes a Black feminist perspective to theorize how historically and contemporarily Black women have employed yoga as a critical survival strategy. This qualitative study specifically charts how Black women have and continue to employ yoga to navigate and resist white normativity and violence inside and outside the yoga studio.