Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change is the first collection to gather together prominent scholars on yoga and the body. Using an intersectional lens, the essays examine yoga in the United States as a complex cultural phenomenon that reveals racial, economic, gendered, and sexual politics of the body. From discussions of the stereotypical yoga body to analyses of pivotal court cases, Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change examines the sociopolitical tensions of contemporary yoga....

This book was written for diasporic South Asian women who have experienced microaggression or discrimination in modern yoga spaces in Canada or abroad. Punam Mehta, Ph.D. reveals how the yoga movement in Canada has been harmful to yoga’s grounding in Jain history, to South Asian social and cultural development, and to Jain diasporic women born and raised in Canada. She argues that marginalized women could recenter themselves by practicing yoga to overcome discrimination based on their race...