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
