This dissertation examines the embodied experiences of those raised as women within evangelical purity culture. Purity culture is an evangelical Christian movement that promotes strict rules around sexual abstinence before marriage, modest dress for women, and conservative gender roles. Utilizing 65 in-depth interviews, I illustrate how the structures and norms of purity culture shape embodied experiences and the body itself. First, I analyze expectations of female bodily submission to male authority and the "Kingdom of God." Women's bodies are seen as not their own, but objects to be controlled by men and the church for men’s gratification, childbearing, and evangelical proselytizing. I next examine how thinness operates as a manifestation of purity culture values like bodily discipline, modesty, and whiteness. I then demonstrate purity culture as a "spiritualized rape culture," outlining how its norms foster vulnerability to assault through withholding sexual education and patriarchal power dynamics. I also examine narratives that blame women for "tempting" men and “causing” assault and abuse. Finally, I analyze embodied consequences of purity culture experiences including sexual dysfunction, disembodiment, and disordered eating. This novel focus on embodiment and health impacts within purity culture expands understanding of this influential religious movement, revealing how religious culture can profoundly impact corporeal realities, with findings relevant to scholars, practitioners, religious leaders, and those with lived experiences.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and the national declaration of a Public Health Emergency (PHE), many government agencies in the world became concerned with the concept of health equity and started to build and bolster their programs in service of it. Health equity generally manifests in government healthcare agencies via a collection of efforts that are meant to positively impact health outcomes and eliminate disparities for historically marginalized groups. Health equity does not have one standard and consistent definition for what it is or how to advance it, even in its current application to government policies, strategies, and activities.

The experiences of the 2020 pandemic demonstrated that human lives are not valued equally as certain communities suffered disproportionately based on race, ethnicity, and social condition. The reality of how populations are socially valued and then stratified perhaps cannot be contained within the concept and actions of advancing health equity despite many governmental agencies building new programs with the intention of addressing the inequities highlighted by the pandemic. These new government programs and practices aiming to advance health equity include non-traditional methods to address health disparities, such as providing access to food security and housing to mitigate the impact that social condition has on health.

This dissertation aims to answer the questions, what is health equity? And, once we know what health equity is, can it be achieved? As exemplary of advancing health equity through policy, initiatives, and strategic plans, this dissertation includes analyses of health equity concepts within Public Health Emergency (PHE) policy and actions during the pandemic, and resulting policy, strategy, and action that was inspired by the pandemic at a California state Medicaid department.

This dissertation also includes a discussion of the missing elements of advancing health equity within government policies and practices, and why the same elements may be absent from social welfare programs altogether. Lastly, this dissertation includes a discussion of where we might go from here with this knowledge and under current conditions if we wish to live in a more equitable society.

This multi-method dissertation explores the lived experiences of direct care workers who provided essential in-home care for older adults in the United States. I expand beyond opposing narratives that spotlight positive or negative experiences and consequences for direct care workers, and instead highlight the complexity and nuance of care work. First, using quantitative content analysis, I explore the relationship between emotion work requirements and pay rates in online job advertisements for home health aides which shows that these workers are undercompensated for their labor. Next, I use semi-structured qualitative interviews to discuss how the often deeply personal ties and intrinsic motivations for joining the direct care workforce open opportunities for deep meaning-making, but also for institutional exploitation. Then, I investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted direct care workers’ experiences of work, which suggests that they experienced challenges both personally and professionally. Lastly, I explore direct care workers experiences of and vulnerability to disenfranchised grief when their clients die. I suggest that the social construction of their close relationship with clients and a lack of agency/institutional support delegitimizes care workers’ grief. Through this analysis, I show that social and professional blurred boundaries and marginalization shapes experiences of work, mental health, and overall well-being for this critical workforce. This work has important implications for policy implementation and practices to better support direct care workers including increased pay rates, peer-support groups, increased training programs, and mental health coverage under insurance.

In this dissertation, I set out to understand how funds shape and are shaped by policy changes, how funds negotiate and portray their own organizational identities, and what role funds play – if any – in the movement for reproductive health, rights, and justice. To investigate these issues, I completed a content analysis of 97 abortion fund websites and social media profiles as well as in-depth interviews with 22 abortion fund leaders. I find that abortion funds were founded in response to local conditions and have continued to evolve in response to deep rooting in local communities. This was particularly highlighted in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, as funds’ public-facing communications focused on connecting with their communities to engage existing supporters, recruit new people to the cause, reassure local individuals seeking abortion care, and connect patients to resources. However, over the course of the next year, funds’ response to the Dobbs decision shifted, becoming more national in scope as they were forced to work more closely with other funds to move patients from states with newly restrictive abortion laws into states with more permissive or supportive policies. Through an exploration of funds’ espoused and enacted values around diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, I find that abortion funds are continuing to negotiate their identities in response to a variety of internal and external forces, including leadership transitions and pressures from umbrella organizations and funders. Finally, I find that funds center care work, which sometimes makes it hard for them to locate themselves within the movement for health, rights, and justice. By centering care work as liberatory and resistive movement work, I challenge current theories of social movements and locate funds as movement actors.