Il Corpo dello Yoga: le donne nell'immaginario e nella pratica dello yoga contemporaneo

Over the past two decades, yoga has become a global phenomenon. Publications, events, sites and styles of practice, as well as the number of teachers and practitioners have grown exponentially, diversifying and reconfiguring yoga as a central component of paths of spiritual research, wellness, health, personal development, renewal of lifestyles and social transformation. Meanwhile yoga has assumed a prominent position in academic research, transcending the disciplinary boundaries of the history of philosophy and religions, to enter the fields of the bio-medical and the social sciences. This dissertation looks at yoga through the lens of sociology. Informed by my personal experience as a scholar-practitioner, it is grounded on an ethnographic research conducted in the city of Genoa and on the analysis of the imagery concerning women, the body and the practice of yoga. The research identifies continuities and interferences between the contexts of practice and the cultural repertoires in the yogaland, focusing on the representation of white femininity as an ideological construct that mediates the normalization of a yoga-for-all universalist paradigm. It then shows how the intersection of gender and coloniality configures the contexts of practice, the spheres of production of knowledge (including the academia) and the imaginaries around yoga, within a political-economic regime of precarity. The body of yoga, as a historically situated locus of experience and reproduction of practices concerning health, healing, spirituality, well-being, personal growth and social transformation, redefines corporeal, social and cultural boundaries of the yoga-for-all paradigm. At the same time, the thesis identifies dissonances between representation and experience, recognizing in the practicing body a legitimate site of signifying experience, where the combined effects of compulsory heterosexuality and racism are deposited and where the material repercussions of precarity are inscribed. In this sense, interferences emerged with respect to the dominant representation of the body of yoga open up a space for constructing a micro-politics of the practice.