Crises as Creation: Feminist Identities in Chador Wangmo’s La Ama and Kyetse

This chapter aims to critically examine how Chador Wangmo’s writings, with a literary de-centered approach, employ interiority, rupture, and recovery as central focus, thereby presenting Bhutanese marginalized female characters as narratively self-motivated and emotionally complex. Drawing on Affect Theory for the textual analysis of the selected novels, the chapter further examines how Wangmo channels emotions born of structural crises into characters’ silences and gestures, and how crises not only develop a narrative event but also act as a catalyst to reshape characters’ selves. The chapter argues that in her two poignant narratives La Ama… a mother’s call (2015) and Kyetse… destiny’s call (2016), Wangmo inscribes systemic crises—domestic violence, displacement, institutional forces, and gendered silencing, not only as external disruptions but also as affective ruptures that adhere to the characters’ inner worlds, destabilizing their fixed identities, catalyzing processes of becoming, and remapping their place within literary imagination. This line of inquiry directly supports the Crisis and Futurity volume’s goal to examine how crises reshape South Asian identities and produce speculative futures. The chapter concludes that the crises experienced by Wangmo’s characters are not only the “narratives of suffering” but also one of reframing identities through the affective rupture, paving the way for empowerment.