Book Review: Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis

Abstract

Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis. Edited by Beth Berila, Melanie Klein, and Chelsea Jackson Roberts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 356 pp. $100.00. Jen Aubrecht University of California, Riverside In light of the recent election in the United States, it is more important than ever to engage with yoga as a tool for feminist social justice work. Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis is a guide to using yoga as a tool for social change. The edited book also lays out how some yoga spaces have yet to achieve their full liberatory potential. Together, the chapters ask us to consider how yoga and yoga practice can reify social injustice. They also provide examples of how yoga practices can be – and in some cases already are – a tool for the liberation of individuals and communities. The book is edited by Beth Berila, Melanie Klein, and Chelsea Jackson Roberts, and collects seventeen essays written by a diverse set of activist yogis, many of whom are people of color or who identify as queer; all of the authors identify as feminist or womanist. The book is structured in three sections, which take up topics of inclusion and exclusion, body image and beauty, and individual and collective liberation. Although some of the essays could benefit from a more nuanced (or less Patanjali-focused) view of the histories of yoga practices, the collection articulates a needed feminist and praxis-oriented perspective in the field of Critical Yoga Studies, which has mostly been focused on questions surrounding the history, commodification, and appropriation of yogic practices. The anthology asks readers to consider how feminist, womanist, and/or queer perspectives can be used to make yoga practice a more truly liberatory endeavor for all. The first of the three sections, “Inclusion/Exclusion in Yoga Spaces”, asks readers to consider yoga studios as spaces of exclusion; it contains powerfully written womanist auto- ethnographies by Marcelle M. Haddix and Jillian Carter Ford who articulate their experiences as Black female yogis in often-exclusionary yoga spaces. Their essays address the exclusion they have frequently seen in yoga spaces and provide a clear articulation of precisely how exclusive yoga spaces can be harmful, which helps them clarify the stakes of the book as a whole. Roopa Kaushik-Brown’s essay, “Toward Yoga as Property”, takes up the increasing propertization of yoga, and contextualizes that argument within discourses of whiteness and Critical Race Theory. Her articulate and considerate essay proposes that practitioners must name and understand the obliterative effect that whiteness has had on yoga (Brown 2016, 81) in order to combat the ongoing extraction of yoga from the public commons. It, and other strong essays in the section, ask us, who is excluded from yoga spaces? And, what does exclusion cost individuals and the yoga community as a whole? The second section, “The Intersection of Yoga, Body Image, and Standards of Beauty,” takes up questions around yoga bodies, yoga advertising, and yoga embodiment. Jennifer Race and Yoga 1.1 (2016)