Simone de Beauvoir’s embodied ambiguity in sport: yoga as a feminist case study

Abstract

According to Beauvoir, the body is a ‘situation’ in which social meanings and facticity are intertwined. Consequently, the concept of embodiment cannot be reduced to a mere instrument of optimisation or an object of regulation. Drawing on Beauvoir’s existential ethics of ambiguity, this article analyses contemporary Western posture yoga as a movement culture in which practitioners negotiate transcendence (projects, agency) and immanence (bodily limits, social inscriptions) simultaneously. The empowerment/objectification tensions at stake have been richly documented in feminist sport history and sociology; the contribution here is to show how Beauvoir’s body-as-situation vocabulary clarifies the mechanisms by which yoga can alternately expand and constrain freedom within concrete practice situations. To avoid reading immanence/transcendence as a crude binary, the paper reconstructs the distinction between ontological immanence (shared embodied finitude) and imposed immanence (social confinement to object-status). Building on this diagnosis, the article translates conceptual analysis into pedagogical guidance by proposing ‘ambiguity literacy’ as a teachable skill and by outlining practical guardrails for instructors and studios (e.g. transcendence-with and anti-objectification by design). The result is an application of Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics to sport that honours lived embodiment while guiding practical transformation.