This article examines the ways in which contemporary yogawear brands contribute to the perpetuation of patriarchal social constructs around the female body and new modes of moral distinction, discipline, surveillance and social control. They do so by promoting an internally and externally self-monitored body. The yoga uniform and its symbolic ‘invisible corset’ respond to the social need to create similarity and sense of belonging whilst simultaneously creating status and class division. Yogawear poses a paradox as it concurrently empowers and controls the female body, signalling both austere and hedonistic, individual and collective values with a postfeminist sensibility. This article evaluates the idealized bodies of Lululemon Athletica and Aloyoga – the two leading global yogawear brands in the sportswear and fashion industries. Specifically analysing the interplay of gender, social class and race on social media, it examines how yogawear and the yoga uniform reinforce traditional, regulating and standardizing female body ideals validating certain body types and silencing others.
America and to determine how Americans view yoga. This augmented study focused on the growing practice of yoga in America, from the perspectives of yoga practitioners, teachers, studio owners, as well as the non-practicing U.S. public.The Key Audiences General Population/All Americans : A sample of the American population as a whole of persons who are aged 18 and older. Yoga Practitioners: People who have practiced yoga in the last 6 months in a class setting and are not yoga teachers. Studio Owners: Studio owners who own one or more locations where yoga is practiced or taught. Teachers: Practitioners who have taught or led others in the past six months or who are in training to do so.
This article considers the male undershirt within discourses of distinctive Australian national dress styles, bush wear and swimwear. Through the case study of Chesty Bonds advertisements, this article will argue that the undershirt became a symbol of strength, virility, heroicism and mateship during the 1940s and 1950s. In aligning the Chesty Bond character with iconic Australian heroic types the surf lifesaver and the bushman advertisers were able to draw on mythologies of masculine cultural identity to promote the undershirt as a staple of the hegemonic male wardrobe. Through an analysis of the Chesty Bond comic-strip advertisements, I will argue that the athletic undershirt contributed to discourses of national identity in which the white male was dominant, and women and non-Anglo-Celtic men were marginalized, seen as being outside the Australian archetype.
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