Re-Turning “Yoga Vibes

Vibes” is a popular term often associated with contemporary yoga. “Yoga vibes” may seem like a desirable sensory-affective experience associated with a yogic atmosphere. Yet, spaces of yoga practice carry discursive and material messaging that privileges Western re-interpretations of yoga, over its spiritual origins. This diffractive auto/ethnography reconfigures assumptions about “yoga vibes” from the perspective of a yoga teacher who seeks to challenge her own privileged identities. Writing-with Barad’s “cutting together-apart,” reflections, interviews, and observations are woven together into a fictive auto/ethnographic narrative. This re-telling of an experience teaching yoga reconfigures “yoga vibes” with white neoliberal feminism that forms in the relationships among things, sensations, discourse, and place. The purpose of this re-telling is to locate emplaced power and reconfigure hegemonic prerogatives with/in the yoga industry

Indian and Buddhist Studies · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory