Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs: Stories of Religious Trauma / Victoria Houser, Mari Ramler.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Houser, Victoria, editor.

Ramler, Mari, editor.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 p.)

Place of Publication:

University Park, PA Penn State University Press, [2026]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs confronts the enduring effects of religious trauma by centering the body as both a site of harm and a source of healing. This collection offers a necessary space for truth telling, grief, and renewal. Bringing together critical autoethnographies and theoretical reflection, this volume examines how purity culture intersects with sexuality, gender, race, ability, class, neurodiversity, and spirituality. Contesting evangelicalisms focus on bodily autonomy and sexual politics, contributors explore how embodied storytelling becomes a means of resistance and transformation. Addressing topics such as reproductive rights in fundamentalist contexts, eugenics-inspired rhetoric linking queerness and disability, and ritual practices like tattooing, each chapter testifies to the ways individuals remember, resist, and reclaim wholeness after harm. By foregrounding lived experience, the book shifts the study of religious rhetoric from theology and persuasion toward embodiment and trauma, illuminating not only what religious discourse does but what it costs. Scholars and students of religion, feminist and queer studies, and rhetoricas well as activists engaged in justice and healing workwill find in this volume both critical insight and a call to action. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Hannah Benefiel, Mathew Boedy, Carrie Drake, Susan Garza, Amanda K. Gross, Ada Hubrig, Deborah Leiter, Camille Kaminski Lewis, Chaim McNamee, Haleh Mir Miri, Tessi Muskrat, Christopher Peace, Mary Pitts, Joseph Richards, Elaine Schnabel, Julie J. Sisler, and Kylie Sommer.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Content Warning

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Bodies and Beliefs in Religious Rhetoric / Victoria Houser, Mari Ramler

Part 1 Rhetorical Bodies

1 Repainting Gods Temple: Tattoo as Post-Traumatic Rhetoric and Healing Practice / Chaim McNamee

2 A Working Brain, Womb, and Mouth: The Female Body in Bob Jones Universitys Purity Culture / Camille Kaminski Lewis

3 On Rhetoric, Religious Trauma, Disability, and Queerness: A Love Letter from a Disabled, Nonbinary Queer / Ada Hubrig

Part 2 Body Language

4 Confession as Apology and Testimony: Disordered Eating and Compulsive Truth-Telling / Hannah Benefiel

5 Orange-Flower Water and Olive Oil: Rhetorical Autonomy in Stories of Spiritual Deconstruction / Kylie Sommer

6 Reworking Religious Trauma Through Ritual / Joseph Richards, Elaine Schnabel

7 When Purity Culture Provides Cover for Sexual Trauma You Later Remember: An Autorhetorical Reflection / D. S. Leiter

8 Its Never Enough: Purity Culture and Surveillance / Tessi Muskrat

Part 3 Bodies and Harm

9 Blood and Shame / Susan Garza

10 Intervening in Purity Culture: A Social Responsibility / Julie Sisler, Mary Pitts

11 The Body of Trauma and the Body of Christ / Matthew Boedy

Part 4 Healing Bodies

12 Becoming Multiplicitous: An Autoethnography of Religious Rigidity and Queer Identity / Christopher Peace

13 Why Mennonites Cant Dance and Other Tales of White Settlers: Moving Toward Embodied Healing for Collective Liberation / Amanda K. Gross

14 When the Body Remembers: The Body as a Site of Trauma and Memory / Carrie Drake

15 Theologizing Violence: Diasporic Bodily Toromas and the Sediments of Iranian Islamic Interrogative Culture / Haleh Mir Miri

List of Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed April 28 2026)

ISBN:

0-271-10198-9

9780271101989