Damaged Like Me by Kimberly Dark

Author:Kimberly Dark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2021-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

13. Fat Pedagogy in the Yoga Class

The significant artifact

This is a story about what it means to allow the body to be seen. To be seen in movement, to be seen in pleasure, to be seen as the model for the physical pose for alignment, for peace. It’s about beauty and acceptance as tools for teaching others, consciously wielded and constantly part of unconscious exploration. It’s about vulnerability, persistence, and strength. In addition to talking to help bring yoga students into the experience of the body, teachers allow them to witness our experience of being in our own bodies. During teaching, we are each internal subjects, in addition to being seen by students. We can never fully understand what we’re offering, except through contemplation of our experience and of the comments and nonverbal responses we receive from others. We model presence and confidence and vulnerability. Indeed, we offer a holistic experience of being as a model. I am a fat woman—among many other identities—and therefore I offer a fat pedagogy, whether or not I ever articulate it in the yoga studio.

The body is the significant artifact.

Artifact, noun

1. any object made by human beings, especially with a view to subsequent use.

2. a handmade object, as a tool, or the remains of one, as a shard of pottery, characteristic of an earlier time or cultural stage, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.

3. any mass-produced, usually inexpensive object reflecting contemporary society or popular culture

The body itself may be a different kind of noun, an organic form. But what we make of bodies socially—the ways in which we socially construct the meaning of bodies—becomes the artifact. We are performative creatures; our bodies are both product and process, and our ways of being influence others. When my fat body teaches yoga, the expectation of what media-culture has taught us that fat bodies can and should do (things like sitting, eating, crying, rolling over, and being sick, sad, and dying) is disturbed by the fact of my body moving and speaking in the yoga teacher role. The resulting dissonance becomes part of the teaching space I hold for students. Even if we never speak of it (though sometimes we do), my body is enacting fat pedagogy.

Every yoga teacher comes to terms with what it means to be seen. And that’s no small matter, for women in particular. Already positioned as “the weaker sex,” women often reach an unassailable pinnacle of whatever form of fitness they practice before they allow the body to be seen. As sociologist Erving Goffman explained back in the 1950s, we manage identity using a variety of artful means. We manage our identities to find basic comfort, to maximize privilege, and to minimize oppression. The body is always teaching, and even more so in classes, like yoga, where the body is demonstrating form. Even when teaching topics, like sociology, that ostensibly involve only the minds of students and teachers, my body is teaching. People think they can overlook my body, but it’s never true.

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