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Drawing on participant observation and interviews in two yoga studios in the highly socially stratified city of Marseille, France, this paper explores the understandings of yoga as a health practice that emerge at the intersections between yoga styles and their social contexts of consumption. Its insights emerge from the comparison of three modern yoga styles that were developed for Western English-speaking cultural contexts – Iyengar, Bikram and Forrest – and which differ in form but also in the chronology of their emergence on the global yoga market and that of their reception in France. These three yoga styles are also branded through contrasting mythologies of transformational healing, and the aim of this paper is to explore how a brand conceptualization of yoga as a health practice relates to or resonates with the embodied experiences of practitioners, and to the socio-cultural contexts in which practitioners and their practices are embedded. The paper contributes a new case study to the global yoga scholarship and to a poorly studied French yoga scene, but more importantly, it cross-examines the discourses through which a yoga style is branded, the way it is transmitted, and the social context and social positioning of the individuals who practice it. Combining perspectives on the body, narrative and rituals, it identifies how yoga healing is construed in relation to gender, ethnicity and class and the points of consensus and dissent that emerge from the encounters between French social bodies and exogenous yoga styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has documented that, around the world, women who are childless against their will suffer from an array of social, economic and emotional difficulties. The causes of this suffering are primarily related to their gender position in society and their gender identity. This paper addresses the impact of class differences on the gender-related suffering of childless women in the socially very hierarchically structured society of Bangladesh. The main method was gathering life histories of illiterate rural poor childless women and educated urban middle-class childless women. The rural childless women experience strong stigma in society, as their identity is devalued due to their inability to produce children. As a result, they suffer from feelings of guilt, role failure, loss of self-esteem, abandonment by the family, social isolation, and impoverishment. In contrast, because of their relatively high socio-economic status and good educational background, urban childless women have more opportunities to avail themselves of alternative social identities and thus avoid social isolation. Despite these differences, both groups of women lead frustrated lives, burdened with a deep sense of guilt for not being able to produce children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]