Journal of Transnational American Studies

This article investigates the cultural politics of the yoga pant to show how a popular US fashion item has recalibrated new meanings for a South Asian religo-philosophical practice. In twenty first–century US discourse, the yoga pant appears in cultural spaces as diverse as textile design, mom fiction, and music video. Drawing on feminist materialisms, I analyze representations of the yoga pant to track its journey through transnational circuits of power. I propose the dialectical concept of surfacing, understood as a drive towards flatness that also exposes depth, to analyze the contradictory work that the yoga pant can perform. The yoga pant enmshes the postural practice of yoga within industrial textile engineering, contributes to gendered body discipline, and often occludes yoga's South Asian dimensions. Yet the yoga pant can also support visions of radical freedom from gendered and racialized hierarchies. The active materiality of this fashion item sheds new light on how the practice of yoga participates in twenty first–century projects of constraint and liberation.