ABSTRACT
This article examines the rise of yoga and mindfulness industries, also known euphemistically as “self-care” or “wellness” cultures within the context of the United States. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work in commercial yoga studios in Chicago, Boston, and Houston, I interrogate the imperatives of health alongside the racialized and gendered definitions of beauty. Within this frame, I examine how and why yoga bodies have become synonymous with white women and their wellness. I argue that white woman wellness, as an assemblage, reveals the most recent adaptation of white hygiene, a mechanism by which white hegemony and its reliance on white woman’s purity remains intact in twenty-first century Anglo-North American settings.
