Mapping the reflexive contours of contemporary homosexual lives

LGBTQ people continue to encounter discrimination and atrocities in many societies, even in contemporary times where normalization of homosexuality is alleged to have grown. My study, grounded in anti-gay religious contexts, focuses on reflexivity and aims to contribute new insights into contemporary homosexual lives. More specifically, the study takes place at the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and the lived experiences of middle-aged gay men. It reveals various forms of structural and societal oppression that gay men face, the coping mechanisms they deploy, and the consumption choices they make. As a member of the same marginalized group of gay men that I examine, I also employ my personal experiences to present insights to further understandings of consumer coping and homosexual identity formation. Three articles, two of which are published in Consumption Market & Culture, comprise this PhD thesis. The first two essays offer introspective autoethnographic poetry and dance as methodological contributions. These expressive media are used to surface a gay man’s reflexive, internal deliberations in the social context of religious and other structurally imposed oppression of his homosexuality. In the first study, I present my reflexive, autoethnographic poetry as an example of using arts-based research methods to reveal intersectional effects of religious fundamentalism, the recently scrapped anti-sodomy statute--Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and heteronormative class-based social structures in India that oppressed LGBTQ people there. I use homosexuality in India as a context and autoethnographic poetry as a method in order to explain the potential of arts-based research methods in intersectionality studies. This chapter primarily demonstrates the use of arts-based research methods (poetry in this study) to reveal the mental and social impacts of intersectional oppression. The second study offers a personal account of how my consumption of a particular dance called Tandava helped me cope with the difficulties of my homosexual identity formation. In contrast to the previous essay that mobilized my discursive reflexivity, in this chapter, I use the non-discursive terrain of sensations. This enables me to access my embodied reflexivity where my understanding of myself unfolds during my engagement with a highly paradoxical form of dance. My reflexive autoethnographic dance account explores how I mobilized dance movements, symbolism, and my visceral embodied dance experience during my internal deliberations to address my homosexual identity issues. Through an evocative personal dance narrative, this chapter pulls attention to the many performance-centric ways of knowing that are themselves marginalized and unrecognized forms of consumption. My dance engagement surpasses the discursivity of language. It reveals much about the existing gender, sexuality, and cultural discourses in marketing and consumer research. Overall, the first two articles in this Ph.D. dissertation primarily make methodological contributions and offer empirical evidence of how introspection acts as a highly effective approach to accessing reflexivity. The third study, foregrounded in the inherently reflexive process of coping, illuminates a possible market-based outcome of the coping process. It examines the lives of single, middle-aged Irish Catholic gay men who were all affected by the institutional religious rejection of homosexuality during their upbringing and subsequent education and careers. The study used an oral history method for data collection to investigate the impact of systemic oppression on Irish gay men, and their response to such oppression through their coping behaviors. In this anti-gay society, participants were found to go through a multi-stage process. It started from hopelessness when they punished themselves and led to their choices of different altruistic careers through which they seemed to gain a sense of redemption. Situated within the existing consumer coping literature, the conceptual focus of this study lies in the choice of a career within market systems and its relationship to the study participants’ coping with the religious oppression of homosexuals. Furthermore, my study reveals how gay men’s altruistic engagements may be the result of coping with structural forces such as the religious oppression of homosexuality. The findings, most importantly, reveal the carryover role of, and growth emanating from, coping. These effects were visible most clearly in the study participants’ choices of their careers

Liminal consumption of 'The Cosmic Ballet': an authoethnography

This study explores the consumption of dance during the identity transition of a homosexual man as a means of appreciating the role of dance in identity management. The account explicates how consumption of a transcendental and paradoxical form of dance called Tandava, or “the cosmic ballet,” empowers an individual to deal with his homosexual identity issues at key liminal junctures. Specifically, the study explores how the homosexual body mobilizes the movements and symbolism in the dance to negotiate identity issues. The study employs the first author’s lived experiences as the research material and depicts his Tandava against the backdrop of his “moments of marginalization.” In particular, autoethnographic writing is fused with the first author’s dance performance to serve as a method of inquiry into his homosexual identity formation. The study shows how dance facilitated the first author’s identity transition from a state of confusion to acceptance. In so doing the study contributes both to the literature on homosexual identity formation and on dance in consumer researc

Comammox Functionality Identified in Diverse Engineered Biological Wastewater Treatment Systems

Complete ammonia oxidation (comammox) to nitrate by certain <i>Nitrospira</i>-lineage bacteria (CMX) could contribute to overall nitrogen cycling in engineered biological nitrogen removal (BNR) processes in addition to the more well-documented nitrogen transformations by ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB), and anaerobic ammonia-oxidizing (anammox) bacteria (AMX). A metagenomic survey was conducted to quantify the presence and elucidate the potential functionality of CMX in 16 full-scale BNR configurations treating mainstream or sidestream wastewater. CMX proposed to date were combined with previously published AOB, NOB, and AMX genomes to create an expanded database for alignment of metagenomic reads. CMX-assigned metagenomic reads accounted for between 0.28 and 0.64% of total coding DNA sequences in all BNR configurations. Phylogenetic analysis of key nitrification functional genes <i>amoA</i>, encoding the α-subunit of ammonia monooxygenase, <i>haoB</i>, encoding the β-subunit of hydroxylamine oxidoreductase, and <i>nxrB</i>, encoding the β-subunit of nitrite oxidoreductase, confirmed that each BNR system contained coding regions for production of these enzymes by CMX specifically. Ultimately, the ubiquitous presence of CMX bacteria and metabolic functionality in such diverse system configurations emphasizes the need to translate novel bacterial transformations to engineered biological process interrogation, operation, and design

Sequencing Human Mitochondrial Hypervariable Region II as a Molecular Fingerprint for Environmental Waters

To protect environmental water from human fecal contamination, authorities must be able to unambiguously identify the source of the contamination. Current identification methods focus on tracking fecal bacteria associated with the human gut, but many of these bacterial indicators also thrive in the environment and in other mammalian hosts. Mitochondrial DNA could solve this problem by serving as a human-specific marker for fecal contamination. Here we show that the human mitochondrial hypervariable region II can function as a molecular fingerprint for human contamination in an urban watershed impacted by combined sewer overflows. We present high-throughput sequencing analysis of hypervariable region II for spatial resolution of the contaminated sites and assessment of the population diversity of the impacting regions. We propose that human mitochondrial DNA from public waste streams may serve as a tool for identifying waste sources definitively, analyzing population diversity, and conducting other anthropological investigations

Real-Time Quantitative PCR Measurements of Fecal Indicator Bacteria and Human-Associated Source Tracking Markers in a Texas River following Hurricane Harvey

Hurricane Harvey has caused unprecedented devastation to huge parts of southeastern Texas, particularly damaging the wastewater infrastructure resulting in release of sewage contamination into environmental waters. The purpose of this study was to conduct a preliminary assessment of fecal indicator bacteria (<i>Escherichia coli</i> and enterococci) and human-associated fecal genetic markers (human-associated Bacteroidales), measured using qPCR assays, across a Texas river impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Water samples were collected along the Guadalupe River during September–December 2017. The most heavily flooded sites showed the highest abundance of fecal indicator bacteria and human-associated Bacteroidales markers, indicating that a large number of sewage overflows and stormwater runoff occurred during Harvey flooding. These findings suggest that high levels of human fecal contamination were introduced into waterways draining into the Gulf of Mexico and impaired surface water quality. The human-associated Bacteroidales markers exhibited a low to slightly strong correlation with conventional fecal indicators, suggesting the variable occurrence of different markers and uncertainty of enterococci and <i>E. coli</i> for detection of human fecal pollution. In general, results of this initial microbiological contaminant assessment will serve as baseline information for follow-on studies to monitor existing and emerging public health risks to residents of Texas and potential long-term environmental impacts on the water resources in the impacted regions

Correlative Assessment of Fecal Indicators using Human Mitochondrial DNA as a Direct Marker

Identifying the source of surface water fecal contamination is paramount to mitigating pollution and risk to human health. Fecal bacteria such as <i>E. coli</i> have been staple indicator organisms for over a century, however there remains uncertainty with <i>E. coli</i>-based metrics since these bacteria are abundant in the environment. The relationships between the presence of direct indicator of human waste (human mitochondrial DNA), human-specific <i>Bacteroidales</i>, and <i>E. coli</i> were studied for water samples taken from an urban creek system (Duck Creek Watershed, Cincinnati, OH) impacted by combined sewer overflows. Logistic regression analysis shows that human-specific <i>Bacteroidales</i> correlates much more closely to human mitochondrial DNA (<i>R</i> = 0.62) relative to <i>E. coli</i> (<i>R</i> = 0.33). We also examine the speciation of <i>Bacteroidales</i> within the Duck Creek Watershed using next-generation sequencing technology (Ion Torrent) and show the most numerous populations to be associated with sewage. Here we demonstrate that human-specific <i>Bacteroidales</i> closely follow the dynamics of human mitochondrial DNA concentration changes, indicating that these obligate anaerobes are more accurate than <i>E. coli</i> for fecal source tracking, lending further support to risk overestimation using coliforms, especially fecal coliforms and <i>E. coli</i>

Impact of Heavy Metals on Transcriptional and Physiological Activity of Nitrifying Bacteria

Heavy metals can inhibit nitrification, a key process for nitrogen removal in wastewater treatment. The transcriptional responses of <i>amoA</i>, <i>hao</i>, <i>nirK</i>, and <i>norB</i> were measured in conjunction with specific oxygen uptake rate (sOUR) for nitrifying enrichment cultures exposed to different metals (Ni­(II), Zn­(II), Cd­(II), and Pb­(II)). There was significant decrease in sOUR with increasing concentrations for Ni­(II) (0.03–3 mg/L), Zn­(II) (0.1–10 mg/L), and Cd­(II) (0.03–1 mg/L) (<i>p</i> < 0.05). However, no considerable changes in sOUR were observed with Pb­(II) (1–100 mg/L), except at a dosage of 1000 mg/L causing 84% inhibition. Based on RT-qPCR data, the transcript levels of <i>amoA</i> and <i>hao</i> decreased when exposed to Ni­(II) dosages. Slight up-regulation of <i>amoA</i>, <i>hao</i>, and <i>nirK</i> (0.5–1.5-fold) occurred after exposure to 0.3–3 mg/L Zn­(II), although their expression decreased for 10 mg/L Zn­(II). With the exception of 1000 mg/L Pb­(II), stimulation of all genes occurred on Cd­(II) and Pb­(II) exposure. While overall the results show that RNA-based function-specific assays can be used as potential surrogates for measuring nitrification activity, the degree of inhibition inferred from sOUR and gene transcription is different. We suggest that variations in transcription of functional genes may supplement sOUR based assays as early warning indicators of upsets in nitrification