Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 25
Not so Macho, Man
“The feminine within both the spiritual and
the academic understanding de-emphasise
individual power and agency whether the
external power be supranatural or worldly.”
gender rather than a naturally determined Yin and Yang gender. The feminine within both the spiritual and the academic
understanding de-emphasise individual power and agency
whether the external power be supranatural or worldly.
From this reading Yin yoga then presents a challenge to individual agency. There is the problem of a clustering of feminine qualities into essential outdated binary categorisation,
even though the meanings of feminine and masculine vary
culturally and historically. A further problem is a focus on a singular characteristic of an individual. Yin yoga in privileging the
feminine at the expense of the masculine perpetuates the dichotomy of performed masculine and feminine qualities, perpetuating a hierarchy where Yin is top.
Yin yoga can be seen to both assign an ancient set of gender norms and present them in a dichotomy creating a hierarchical structure. Dichotomy leads to hierarchy, two organising
principles and key mechanisms of oppression in social structures. An oppressive position of the yoga practitioner that is
outdated in 2020. A society significantly reconfigured gender
roles attenuated by multiple axes of fluid identity in western
society, within family, education and employment and within
an individual lived experience.
Both supernatural and social construct systems collude in
situating Yin yoga as a practice with two objectives, one
spiritual the other political. Yin yoga through establishing a
quasi, spiritual/political feminine practice and language also influences a range of other asana teaching practices and ultimately yoga teacher training, as its adherents operate within
wider yoga culture. What emerges is a shared yoga speak lexicon contributing to a vague idea of a discrete superior feminine value that is not fully transparent. I challenge Yin yoga’s
reductive categorisation of gender qualities and the covert unified language of feminine privilege. This language is equivalent
to the patriarchal masculine pronouns used throughout Yoga’s
philosophical texts and is an affront to inclusivity. Surreptitiously the masculine is categorised in opposition to the Yin qualities, the strong and forceful autocratic, extending to an affiliation with materialistic abuse of the environment, the oppression
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AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021 23
