Nurturing the Female Body: Notions of Wellbeing in Womb Yoga

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. I critically engage with this issue here through an ethnographic study of womb yoga, a women’s alternative therapy developed in the UK. I argue 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.

KEYWORDS:

• United Kingdom
• alternative therapies
• femininity
• healthism
• menstrual cycle
• self-care

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the workshop participants and conveners for sharing their views and experiences with me. Thanks also go to Chia Longman, director of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender at Ghent University, for her willingness to supervise and support this project. I further thank the reviewers for their though-provoking comments to earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. All names used are pseudonyms. The research proposal received approval from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Ghent. Informed consent was obtained from each interviewee.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

Notes on contributors

Carine Plancke

Carine Plancke is an Invited Professor in Anthropology at the Department of Languages and Cultures and a member of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender at Ghent University. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris and the University of Leuven.