Pain and Faith: An Intersectional-Phenomenological Exploration of Syrian Muslim Refugee Women’s Experiences of Yoga and Resettlement in Sweden.

Abstract

This chapter contributes to critical perspectives that address the intersection of leisure, gender and religion in contexts of forced migration. It does so by addressing the experiences of a group of Syrian Muslim refugee women attending women-only yoga courses in their country of resettlement, Sweden. These courses were part of a Civic Orientation programme that combined the prescription of therapeutic yoga and educational activities, aimed at transforming them into integrated, employable Swedish citizens. The participants’ embodied experiences of yoga represent an entry point for capturing the diversity and complexity of navigating forced migration and re-settlement. The research that underpins the chapter integrates phenomenological and intersectional approaches. It involves 22 months of ethnographic research and seeks to centre participants’ lived experiences of both traumasensitive yoga and, more broadly, forced migration and resettlement., The chapter aims to complicate existing assumptions and discourses about the female Muslim body—in contexts of forced migration—as docile, oppressed and a vulnerable object of moral compassion. Through a focus on pain, (im)mobility, yoga and Islamic faith, the chapter offers insights of how participants re-appropriated the secular and self-development-oriented space of trauma-sensitive yoga. It shows how the participants’ engagements and re-appropriations of Yoga complicates rigid dichotomous understandings of East/West, here/there, and secular/religious.