Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

The caption read, “Took the long way home, away from the hustle and bustle where the air is fresh and life moves more simply…In my next life I’m moving [here] to Bali and becoming a rice farmer…” The author is an upbeat, ex-model, Californian yoga instructor. We taught at the same local yoga studio. She has a large, global following for her Instagram account which features an array of picturesque body images in “exotic” retreat landscapes. Each post is accompanied by New-Age sounding aphorisms such as above. My project explores how mediatized space (at the site of the body, in social media, and in tourism-driven capitalist economies) not only re-contextualizes and reinforces existing social and economic hierarchies on a global scale, but how these relationships are upheld through a language of “selfcare” and metaphysical transcendence. The industry’s gig-economy style labor regimes are bolstered by the economics of exclusion that often re-inscribes colonialist tropes. Selfcare and self-actualization depend on racialized, class-based, and nationalist hierarchies within this context.

Based on my ethnographic research and personal experiences as a yoga instructor in for-profit studios and radical communal mutual aid groups, I show how the discourses and philosophy of the community often reinforce exploitative labor structures even as they portray yoga as a form of an alternative community. Indeed, yoga culture claims to offer practitioners a way to live differently, promoting ideas of self-actualization, environmentalism, and humanitarianism—ideologically, functioning as a form of an alternative economy. My paper concludes with a reimagining of the place of physical and care and health in a degrowth-based, non-hierarchical society and the possibilities for communal and individual well-being (and pleasure in inhabiting a body) this would offer.

Info

Day: 2023-09-01
Start time: 12:00
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-2
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist and anti-ableist ecologies

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