A court in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod has jailed a woman for wearing rainbow earrings, the human rights group Egida reported late Wednesday, marking the second case of its kind after Russia banned the so-called “LGBT movement” as an “extremist” organization in November.   According to Egida, law enforcement agents tasked with combating “extremism” detained the woman after a group of “aggressive people” approached her and her friend at a local cafe and filmed them on camera.

ngl russia is not making it easy to give critical support lol

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]English
      6•1 year ago

      It’s more politically expedient to use symbols that are homegrown rather than symbols from a foreign place that’s hostile to your home country. Symbols mean different things to different people. From the perspective of the US and the West in general, the rainbow flag is a symbol of queer liberation, but from the perspective of people not from the West, the rainbow flag is just some pinkwashing bullshit. You can’t just ignore the non-Western reading of the symbol especially when we’re talking about what the rainbow means in non-Western countries. It makes a lot more political sense to just find different symbols that actually come from the local culture. By embracing the Western symbol, you’re already subtly insinuating that queerness is some Western invention, which is a queerphobic talking point.

      There’s nothing inherently queer about rainbows. Gay people don’t piss out rainbows, and trans people don’t shit out rainbows. Rainbows are just symbols, which means they ought to be judged based on political expediency on whether to adopt them and where and who to display them to like any other symbol.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]English
      6•1 year ago

      I refuse to say random western sociopaths can just appropriate a symbol of my own liberation and make it bad forever

      I think Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains probably have some bad news for you on that front.