Queering Motherhood: Transgender Identity and Alternative Kinship in the Vicks Ad Featuring Shreegauri Sawant

https://doi.org/10.55966/assaj.2025.4.1.0120

Abstract

This study explores how the Vicks advertisement 2017 called Touch of Care disrupts conventional notions of gender, motherhood, and kinship especially via its depiction of the figure of Shreegauri Sawant, a transgender activist and care giver. In conducting the study, the author will: (1) perform the analysis of how the appearance subverts traditional gender norms and biologically determined motherhood, (2) discuss transgender motherhood as caregiving, and (3) legitimize chosen family as a new mode of kinship. This study employs qualitative textual and critical discourse analysis to analyze the story, verbal and visual messages that are in the ad. Referring to the Queer Theory, especially the Judith Butler concept of gender performativity and David Eng interpretations of queer kinship, the article views the advertisement as a subversive action on heteronormative media culture. The outstanding contribution of the present study is that it determines the manner in which the advertisement queers motherhood giving importance to emotional care rather than biological determinism, which is what makes transgender motherhood identity valid. Also, it discusses how the advertisement spreads the idea about chosen family as a valid kinship system that conflicts with the social unease about queer families and promotes transgender parenthood on a wider scale.

Keywords: Transgender Motherhood, Queer Kinship, Gender Performativity, Media Representation, Indian Advertising