What is Important Yoga Studies?: Gender, Health and Cross-Cultural Consumption

Who practices yoga in North America? Why are so many of them white able bodied women? This multi-sited feminist ethnography of contemporary yoga communities in North America represents my exploration of inequalities in the yoga world. Through conversations about how we experience our bodies, our abilities, social locations, and the ways in which we learn from each other as yoga students and teachers in spaces where we learn and teach yoga, this dissertation asks questions about inclusion and exclusion, about body normativity, and about authenticity. Yoga is an ideal field for feminist scholarship because it offers a lens through which to examine and potentially shift intersecting inequalities not only in the yoga studio, but in the health and fitness milieu as well. Before yoga became a topic of discussion for scholars, people practiced yoga as an exotic health and spiritual practice. By the early 2000s, yoga evolved into something for public consumption with its fancy Lululemon pants and wild yoga festivals in the mountains, to chocolate yoga, yoga for men, and rage yoga. In the twentieth century, yoga was a subculture activity, the sort that was commonly known for attracting crunchy granola hippy types and spiritual explorers who had reinvented yoga for their own purposes. Over the past two decades, yoga's explosion in popularity led me to ask how yoga's meaning as a spiritual practice shifted from subculture to mainstream health and fitness lifestyle.