Suchergebnisse

In this article, we draw upon the work of leading new materialist Karen Barad to explore the possibilities for knowing women's yoga bodies differently. Engaging insights gathered from an embodied ethnography on contemporary Yoga in dialogue with Barad's concept of entanglement, we contemplate the complexity of a lived experience in a Yoga body. Engaging the voices and movement experiences of 19 committed women yoga practitioners, we explain 'Yogic union' as states of absorption facilitating an awareness of an existence that is complex, interconnected and involving both human and non-human materiality. Specifically, we work within and between the embodied experiences of the researcher and her participants, feminist new materialist theory, and creative writing to present Yoga bodies as phenomena that are always entangled.

This paper explores the gendered, disruptive effects and affective intensities of COVID-19 and the ways that women working in the sport and fitness sector were prompted to establish more-than-human connection through technologies, the environment, and objects. Bringing together theoretical and embodied insights from object interviews with 17 women sport and fitness professionals (i.e., athletes, coaches, instructors) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper advances a relational understanding of the multiple human and nonhuman forces that shape and transform women's wellbeing during pandemic. Drawing upon particular feminist materialisms (i.e., Barad, Braidotti, Bennett), we reconceptualize wellbeing to move beyond biomedical formulations of health or illness. Through our analysis and discussion, we trace embodied ways of knowing that produce wellbeing as a more-than-human entanglement, a gendered phenomenon that can be understood as an ongoing negotiation of affective, material, cultural, technological and environmental forces during a period of disruption and uncertainty.