Commodify Your Body Electric

Have you heard all of the latest #news about #yoga? LeBron James recently crashed a yoga class, and credited it with improving his flexibility and stamina in the NBA finals. Men’s Journal reports that the yoga craze is finally crossing over to the “dudes,” a trend helped by the promise of “ripped abs” and a “shredded body,” “with no impact.” Sure, anything’s possible!

Yoga has lately been credited for saving the life of a marine and freeing a prisoner from Gitmo, apparently. Who knows, a yoga tax might even help us balance the budget. Meanwhile, yoga apparel is being blamed for the humiliation of bankers and the distraction of hormonal middle-schoolers.

All this reminds us that Issue 22 of The Baffler, published last year, featured a great piece by Jorian Polis Schutz about the rise in popularity of yoga in America, and about the often-absurd industry that has developed around it. Here’s an excerpt:

If you have not tried yoga yourself, then you’ve surely heard of its amazing popularity and beneficence from middlebrow (or middle eye–brow) magazines, newspapers, sitcoms, and ad campaigns, which bring news of its aphrodisiac effects. You have probably heard of the elite yoga teachers, mountaintop gurus, and ancient sages, although you have probably not heard that nowadays most kick their earnings upstairs to corporate and cycle through franchises as part of the same class of journeyman laborers produced by other bastions of enlightenment.

[. . .]

The attractions of a professional career in yoga have led to a flourishing of teacher-training programs, a dubious accreditation system, and a glut of teachers with questionable credentials. The seemingly wide variety of training options—with more or less anatomical rigor, devotional practice, contemporary style, and studio heatedness—obscures the essential homogeneity of these programs. They might incorporate the study of essential texts like the Yoga Sutras, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Ramayana, in addition to contemporary Buddhist works. Some might integrate accompanying material like chakra science or bodywork, astrology, herbalism, chanting, or sacred dance. All these magical arts certainly have something to be said for them, especially when measured against what is drummed into our souls by measurement addicts wielding the latest version of the DSM. But few of these programs attempt to connect with critical thought, history, and the arts, and certainly not with biblical hermeneutics, liturgy, or the sacred poetry and song that springs from and nourishes the Abrahamic traditions, or for that matter with ecology, psychoanalysis, the history of science and madness, educational reform, or avant-garde dance and performance art. We remain victims of our own narrowness, even as we attempt to correct for it.

Read the rest of Schutz’s piece, “The State of Stretching: Yoga in America,” and see the accompanying illustrations by Henrik Drescher, here.