Fem/Dabur recently released a Karva Chauth ad centered around a queer couple celebrating the patriarchal festival, which uses food as a weapon of guilt and grief.

The ad’s underlying theme promotes colorism — to use a facial ‘fem créme bleach’ look like a ‘chand ka tukra’.

This is probably one of the clumsiest and cringiest attempts at ‘representation’ I’ve come across recently — where colorism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, feminine fragility try to make themselves acceptable through pinkwashing.

What does ‘Representation’ achieve? Here’s an excerpt from Judith Butler book Gender Trouble, which grapples with ‘gender’ and ‘feminism’:

“What sense does it make to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject? What relations of domination and exclusion are inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics ? The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation. Perhaps, paradoxically, ‘representation’ will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere presumed.” (Butler, 8)