Being a Woman of Color in Purity Culture with Asha Dahya
TEDx speaker and author Asha Dahya is the Creator and Editor in Chief of GIRLTALKHQ. She was born in the UK, raised in Australia, and now lives in the USA. Of Indian descent, Asha grew up in Evangelical churches and was imbued with the teachings of purity culture. She discusses how it shaped her understanding of love, embodiment, and relationships, and why it prevented her from seeking the proper help when her marriage turned abusive. She also discusses how being a woman of color in the United States adds another layer of otherness and objectification within the confines of Evangelical spaces.
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I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
Before we get to our interview with Asha Daya about purity culture and the experience of it as a woman of color, I wanted to point all of you to some of the other work we've done on purity culture, especially as It is conveyed and communicated by women who have experienced that culture.
So we have a couple of interviews with scholars that I think will be of interest.
One is titled Purity Cultural National Security and Racism and that is from September 15th.
So you can look that up in our archives.
That's an interview I did with Dr. Sarah Mosliner of Central Michigan University about her book Virgin Nation and it relates purity culture to Understandings of white womanhood to race and a whole host of other things including a lengthy discussion of true love weights and the silver ring thing movement.
So you can check that out if those topics interest you.
There's also an interview I did with Dr. Leslie Dorough Smith called Sex Scandals Christianity and America and that is from September 7, 2020.
And that is all about how Certain conceptions of manhood and sexuality in American purity culture, but also in American politics function to allow men to often act with impunity when it comes to sex scandals and to Misbehavior and abuse and so on and so forth so you can check that out as well We have
An episode called Dating Jesus, which is from all the way back in season one, but we did re-release it on August 25 of 2020, and you can check that out.
It includes an interview with Reverend Sarah Buteau, who is a minister in the UCC Church, but grew up in purity culture.
And finally, we have an interview with Ruth Everhart, who's an author and who's written a book called Hashtag Me Too and talks about the church's reckoning with the Me Too movement and with the rampant abuse that exists in church spaces.
And that is from January 29 of 2020.
So all four of those episodes are on the topic of purity culture and all four include interviews with women who have experienced purity culture in various ways or who have written about it as scholars.
So I invite you to check those out if you are interested in continuing to learn about this topic, especially in the wake of what happened in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago.
We turn now to our interview with Asha Daya.
And I am joined today by our return guest, someone who's here for the second time, Asha Daya, who is the editor-in-chief and creator of Girl Talk HQ, and also the author of today's Wonder Women, Everyday Superheroes Who Are Changing the World.
Asha, thanks for coming back.
Thank you for having me, Brad.
Great to be back here.
So I wanted to have you back to talk about something we've been talking about over the last week and a half since it happened, and that is what happened in Atlanta.
And I just want to talk about a whole bunch of threads that you're just, for better or for worse, well-positioned to talk about.
And that is purity culture and experiences as a person of color in this country and elsewhere.
And just sort of how all that works together in a kind of church environment, evangelical environment.
So many of our listeners will be familiar with your story.
You have been here before and you are obviously somebody who many people are familiar with, but you have a kind of range of experiences and your identity is just sort of layered and complex in an amazing way.
So would you mind sharing that with us a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I was born in the UK, raised in Australia, where I would consider myself Australian for conversation's sake, have been living in the United States since 2009, grew up conservative, evangelical, and only recently left the church, probably in the last five or six, maybe seven years now.
I forget what year it is.
It's 2021 already.
So yeah, growing up, and I'm also Indian by background, so there's a lot of intersections there in terms of my identity.
But growing up in Australia, and even in the UK, there's the same sense of evangelicalism in terms of the American influence, although the UK has very much its own kind of evangelical ecosystem there.
But Australia especially, It's basically the same except for the politics, which is slightly changing now.
But growing up, you know, I was listening to DC Talk.
We heard about Billy Graham and Chuck Swindoll and Focus on the Family and Purity Culture and I Kissed Dating Goodbye and all these things.
So when I moved to America, I, of course, still being in that conservative mindset, it's like find the church, get involved in the family, do all the things that, you know, you're supposed to do.
And I felt like I just fit in straight away because I knew all the code languages to speak, I guess, and very quickly became indoctrinated into the political mindset of being a conservative evangelical.
So since leaving that in around 2013, after going through a divorce, after getting married very quickly, which a lot of young people do in the church, I quickly learned that a lot of the things that I was taught were Not the healthiest, very toxic.
You know, I started associating with different feminist groups and different social networks, especially in the film industry, which is my background.
I've worked in hosting, producing and writing for my entire career.
So kind of moving out of the church and into more progressive political and feminist spaces, it really gave me a different perspective on all the things that I was taught.
And I'm still going on the journey of Undoing and unlearning a lot of the very toxic and unhealthy things that I was taught, which I guess brings us to this conversation today.
And it's really, really encouraging that we're having it and so many big news outlets are doing it.
So yeah, let's let's dive in.
You tell me where you want to start.
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