Queering and Cripping the “Yoga Body”: Teaching, Practice, and Embodiment

By: Laura Shears

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Synopsis: Queering and Cripping the “Yoga Body” deconstructs the power relations and dominant discourses that shape the image of a healthy, natural, gendered body performing a postural yoga practice.This book examines empirical yoga research, yoga-related media, and yoga teacher training materials to critique how yoga becomes a manageable, predictable intervention that individuals can and should undertake in order to create healthy, manageable, non-burdensome bodies. It argues that when yoga is positioned as a natural intervention, discourses of morality and purity become intertwined with those of measurability, responsibility, control, health, and gender. It also considers the author’s own embodied experience, as well as those of other queer and disabled yoga teachers and practitioners, and how such experiences can open up possibilities for the teaching and practice of yoga.Queering and Cripping the “Yoga Body” will be of interest to graduate students and researchers studying embodiment, health and mindfulness practices, poststructuralism, queer theory, or disability studies, as well as researchers, teachers, and practitioners of yoga.