Contribution short abstract:

Alternative therapies designed to enhance women’s wellbeing have been accused of contributing to healthist and postfeminist agendas rooted in neoliberalism. This paper critically engages with this issue through an ethnographic study of womb yoga, a women’s alternative therapy developed in the UK.

Contribution long abstract:

Alternative therapies which aim to enhance women’s wellbeing have been accused of contributing to healthist and postfeminist agendas which rest upon a neoliberal logic. Feminist scholars have shown that for women, who are primarily held responsible for health issues, healthism induces increased self-surveillance and monitoring of their own and their families’ lifestyles. Moreover, the view that care is a female domain and that the female body needs to be worked on, while integrating feminist values as empowerment and body-consciousness, risks reproducing conventional gender views. This paper critically engages with this issue through an ethnographic study of womb yoga – a women’s alternative therapy developed in the UK. It argues that while being commercial and emphasizing personal responsibility, womb yoga largely works against the current neoliberal optimization ideal. Womb yoga practitioners dismiss goal-oriented self-management and discipline, and avoid a simple reproduction of gender stereotypes by deflecting care away from other-directedness and opening the interpretation of femininity to the imaginative and experiential realms. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the UK – between 2016 and 2019 – and included participant observation in sixteen three-to-five day retreats and forty-six in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted through Skype.