ABSTRACT
The appropriation of yoga by what has been termed the “parent industrial complex” appears across middle to upper income neighborhoods particularly in gentrifying and neoliberal urban spaces. The organization of family yoga classes around White women’s bodies with children as accessories as women seek to reshape into western images of beauty after childbirth, or as sites of fetishized enrichment such as “Family Yoga in Spanish!” (from a flyer seen in a play space in the San Francisco Bay Area specifically catering to White families in gentrified spaces), undermine the roots of intergenerational yoga practices for individual and collective well-being rooted in South Asia. While yoga has been critiqued as upper-caste and exclusive in its home context (Pattnaik; Patankar), it has been reclaimed in South Asian diasporic and other people of color spaces (as discussed in other chapters of this volume) as a site of healing, community, and mindfulness amidst racialized trauma and marginalization.
