This chapter analyzes Indian discourses on body image and identity in contemporary Indian advertising from 2010 to 2020 through a focus on three types of commercials: skin-care product ads, matrimonial ads, and jewelry ads. Each of these genres, we argue, proffers a prescriptive and heteronormative idea about female body image such that this idealized image is intimately tied to prevailing hierarchies of power in neoliberal and globalized India. Engaging millennial and postmillennial feminist and queer theories, we ask these questions: How do contemporary advertisements represent the ideal female body? How do they address and emblematize a neoliberal rhetoric about women’s empowerment and heteronormativity? What modes of resistance and critique, individual and collective, challenge this rhetoric about normative body image? Several scholars have analyzed the relation between body image and women’s ideas of self-worth in contemporary India. As Meenakshi Menon and Preeti Pant observe, “In urban Indian women, there has been an increasing concern with one’s physical appearance and body dissatisfaction (Goswami et al. 2012) that may be attributed to the influence of the media (Kapadia 2009).”1 In dialogue with contemporary feminist scholarship on media representations, this chapter analyzes colorism and body shaming embedded in skin-care product, jewelry, and matrimonial advertising in Hindi and English, as well as feminist activism that challenges these body and skin color norms. Kavita Daiya, Sukshma Vedere, and Turni Chakrabarti Gender, Body Image, and the Aspirational Middle-Class Imaginary of Indian Advertising 10 184 / Kavita Daiya, Sukshma Vedere, and Turni Chakrabarti Through a discursive analysis that attends to the audioscapes and visualscapes of particular commercials, as they appear across television and YouTube, we track how contemporary commercials mobilize new ideas of women’s empowerment and gender equality to sell old products like skin-lightening creams and gold jewelry. Further, we demonstrate that these commercials often reproduce heteronormative conventions of intimacy that, in South Asia, are also linked to racism, caste, and class discrimination. Finally, we identify modes of feminist activism that challenge these body norms propagated across media and point to new strategies and arenas for creating change. Through Indian commercials in contemporary Hindi and English media, we examine how mass media functions as a space for the reinforcement as well as renegotiation of body normativity in the context of India’s aspirational middleclass imaginary. In sum, we map the appearance of colorism, heteronormativity, and patriarchal joint family values to unveil the interplay of capital, female empowerment, and heteronormative intimacies in media discourses about modern Indian women’s embodiment.