Gender and Sexuality
This section asks us to consider how yoga shows up for people of different gender identities and sexual orientations. With that lens, the authors take us through a conversation about how yoga and body image is far from a conversation limited to women (as it is often seen), but rather is part of a much broader consideration for all of us.
Rosie Molinary starts us off with her personal story of the various ways she felt alienated from her body—particularly in how men viewed and treated her body over the years. She shares how yoga, quite unexpectedly, became a way for her to claim her body as her own with love.
Next, Dr. Kerrie Kauer weaves us through her experience as an athlete, particularly once she came out. Using that as a springboard, she also shares her research on athleticism and sexuality and how they intersect at the body—and what yoga can do to help integrate how we all feel about our bodies.
Then Bryan Kest takes us into his experiences of masculinity, growing up emulating his tough father, and how yoga gave him a way to redefine both masculinity and his relationship with his own body.
Next, Ryan McGraw ends the book with his experience as a male yogi with cerebral palsy. After first assuming that yoga wasn’t for him, and hoping that his friends wouldn’t find out he was practicing because it didn’t fit their ideas about what it means to be a man, he found his way both on and off the mat through yoga—and in so doing, inspires us to do the same.
Finally, Dr. Audrey Bilger shares her experience of alienation as the only visible, out lesbian on a college campus, an ensuing encounter with a hostile environment, and how yoga helped her navigate it all and come back to her body.