ABSTRACT
The twenty-first-century explosion of day spas and yoga studios is a distinct urban phenomenon that realigns the mundane and the exotic through the promise of escape that they offer. The City of Toronto and its ‘creative-class’ spokespeople position the Canadian metropolis as a highly desirable space of in-migration for tourists and workers alike. However, in this chapter I show that global Toronto is also a space and time from which people seek to break free, particularly from the alienation of neoliberal capitalist social relations. Drawing on a discourse analysis of promotional materials and interviews with wellness practitioners, this chapter shows how the wellness industries mobilise the desire for journeying elsewhere, while remaining in the city and participating in the broader social reproduction of the city and its dominant social relations. The possibility of transcending the routine aspects of capitalist everyday life is held out through the exotification of health and wellness experiences, as costly, exclusive, and at times, neo-Orientalist in character. Thus, these practices do not simply represent a pluralist expansion of choice in wellness services, but are internal to the reproduction of a differentiated labour force in/for neoliberal capitalism.
