Nurturing the Female Body: Notions of Wellbeing in Womb Yoga

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.