Pictured above: The cover of “Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs: Stories of Religious Trauma.” Book cover courtesy of Penn State University Press.
The new collection centers embodied experiences of religious trauma, resistance and healing
Victoria Houser, an assistant teaching professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Writing Program, has co-edited a new collection examining the cultural and personal effects of evangelical purity culture and other high-control religious environments.
Published by Penn State University Press, “Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs: Stories of Religious Trauma” brings together critical autoethnographies, personal narratives and theoretical reflection. Houser co-edited the volume with Mari Ramler, an associate professor of English at Tennessee Technological University.
The collection’s 15 chapters examine how purity culture intersects with sexuality, gender, race, disability, class, neurodiversity and spirituality. Contributors consider the body as both a site of harm and a source of healing, resistance and renewed autonomy.
Houser’s research and teaching focus on cultural and feminist rhetorics, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, reproductive justice and trauma. The collection grew in part from her research on how religious language shapes cultural understandings of sexuality and the body.
Houser and Ramler sought to foreground a broad range of lived experiences, including those of queer people, people of color and people with disabilities.
“These experiences were not niche,” Houser said. “They were really far more widespread than most people even know.”