Divine Violence: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Goddess-woman in the Abused Goddess Ad Campaign

In the fall of 2013, an ad campaign from the Mumbai-based agency Taproot exploded in popularity on social media and was featured on a variety of news sites, particularly in India and the United States. The campaign, known as the Abused Goddess ads, depicted an iteration of the Goddess most accurately characterized as a Goddess-woman, a divine-human hybrid figure possessing both the divine power of shakti and the vulnerability of human women. Stylized in the “canonical” images of the Goddesses Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Durga, the Goddess-women were shown as bruised victims of domestic violence. The Abused Goddess ads precipitated and codified the contemporary depictions of the Goddess-woman whose later iterations appear in the work of numerous digital artists. In particular, the ads exemplify an aesthetic that harnesses the power of shame and the mingling of gazes to further a secular-humanist ethic at the expense of devotional experience.