Stretchy and Tense: A Diffractive Auto/Ethnography of Privilege With Yoga Pants

Abstract

The contemporary yoga industry is entangled in many contradictions. While yoga is intended to be an inclusive, liberatory practice, its contemporary iterations enact exclusion through an industry that often privileges able-bodied, affluent, white women. As a yoga scholar-practitioner who embodies these identities, I am troubled by how my teaching and studies of yoga further replicate power imbalances. In this article, I interrogate privilege and power as they emerge with yoga pants. I draw upon Barad’s cutting together-apart in a diffractive auto/ethnography. I make literal cuts through the fabric of my yoga pants, as reflections, reactions, and interview transcripts make figurative cuts through self-image, body-image, and feminine norms. I consider how this methodology materializes an entanglement of affective forces, power, and critical feminist academia that is useful in exploring possibilities for change. This inquiry does not conclude, but rather acknowledges an imperfect and ever-evolving interrogation of embodied power as it shapes intellectual inquiry, and spaces of yoga practice.