In The Buzz Cut, we give our take on all of the intellectual and Internet-famous, celebrity and bizarre, buzzy and overlooked news we gossiped about all week.
Queering Up Your Weekend. Now that India’s finally repealed Section 377, it’s a good time to blow-up your feed with some quality queer content. Breaking down the gender binary and the static narrative of gay people, here are all the queer Indian icons you need to know, and the very many different ways to be gay. Take a refresher course on queer speak 101 with our glossary of gender and sexuality related terms. Alok Vaid-Menon’s beautiful essay on being queer, trans, and experiencing the LGBTQ+ desi community for the first time opens up conversations around the conflicts of India’s history and very queer mythology, and the ways in which we still have to work through our collective colonial trauma. And your most bite-sized way to a quick cry is reading Priyanka Arora’s thread on her experiences from being a queer 12-year-old to her Big Fat Gay Indian Wedding.
Diamonds, Doctors, and Drugs. France’s first mistress, Agnès Sorel, held way more power than you would expect for a lady living in the 1440s. Read about how she held the King of France “by the crown jewels” and was gifted with the first cut diamond in the world. Meet Dr. Rakhmabai Bhikaji, the first woman to become a doctor in India and a pioneer for women’s rights, through this illustrated exhibit by Zubaan Books. And do psychotropic drugs free your mind, or do they actually hamper productivity and creativity?
Bad News, Good News. A new research study from the University of Canberra comes to an unsurprising but depressing conclusion: Millennial men feel excluded from measures to increase gender equality and are leading the backlash against against women’s rights. In the world of finance, it seems that well-meaning policies don’t make a difference for women. Instead, the problem is a sexist work culture. Perhaps the antidote to this, across professional fields, is for women to endorse and support other women, loudly and often. And colleges are seeing a lot more ‘nontraditional students’ making up their student body, with many people attending college while being a single caregiver, caring for children, and/or being employed full-time.
