Feeling social change in the gut: gyāstrik and the problematisation of domestic roles among Newar women in contemporary Nepal.

Abstract

Drawing upon 15 months of research conducted in 2018-2019 in Bhaktapur, Nepal, this paper examines how middle-class women experience and make sense of gyāstrik (an umbrella term for multiple gut disorders) as an embodiment of social change. Enumerating dietary injustices and distress following unmet middle-class expectations of well-being and domestic intimacy as a primary cause of the condition, these women narratively problematised social norms and found ways out through the concomitant vocalisation of physical pain and social discontent. While illness epistemologies differ (with the persistence of mind-body dichotomies on the one hand and the centrality of notions of well-being and ideals of self-care on the other), these accounts demonstrate both a passive and active role of the gut in the social change experience, inviting to take the gut as the site where somatic modes of 'attention' and 'action' enable the navigation of personal life trajectories and the negotiation of social change itself.