This paper presents a case study from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a Theravada Bhikkhuni temple in Thailand, tracing how broad social forces narrow to individual subjectivities through affective, embodied experiences. I argue that emotion functions as the primary mechanism for subjective transformation, not purely as an expression of a ‘true’ inner self, but as an interpersonal and affective force that starts beyond the individual and is gradually internalized.
The case moves from a socially distant promise that temporary ordination will save a family member, through an embodied experience of monastic training, to how judgements of embodied monastic discipline produce emotional turbulence, even fourteen years later. The paper illuminates a process of subjective change I call ‘ExBodiment,’ in which external, intersubjective forces are gradually absorbed through the body to re/shape the very subjectivity through which one moves through the world.