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.
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Decolonizing Yoga? and Unsettling Social Justice
Personal Narratives
Articles
I Do Practice Yoga! Controlling Images and Recovering the Black Female Body in ‘Skinny White Girl’ Yoga Culture
Black women’s health and fitness practices remain under-theorized in Public Health, the Social Sciences, and Women’s and Gender Studies. This paper positions the controversy over the XO Jane 2014 post “It Happened to Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes and I’m Suddenly Uncomfortable With It” by Jen Caron, a white woman, within a broader analytical context. It raises and answers two questions: How did Black women, especially yogis – teachers and students – respond to this post? And, what can their responses tell us about the nature of negative ‘controlling images’ in shaping participants’ experiences of yoga and navigating yoga culture? To answer these questions I draw on comments posted on XO Jane’s website in response to Caron’s post, the blog posts from six African American female bloggers, as well as comments to their posts for a qualitative content analysis. Drawing on Black feminist analysis, I argue that Polacheck’s post draws on longstanding tropes used to situate the Black female body, including otherness, monstrosity, deviance, and the idea that Black women take up “too much” space. Three themes emerge from the analysis: naming stereotypes and rejecting controlling images, affirming and resisting ‘skinny white girl’ yoga culture, and defending difference. Black women’s responses to the post highlights the complex ways they may negotiate perceptions of yoga as accessible and inviting, and “race neutral,” while also naming and challenging normative whiteness, dominant beauty standards, and reaffirming Black female worth and visibility. This analysis makes visible the multiple ways that many Black women experience and navigate predominately white yoga spaces. It also demonstrates the ways in which African American women resist stereotypes.