In the first episode, there is a South Asian woman in a restaurant who says or does pretty much nothing in the scene, except that Tracy pulls off her headscarf by mistake and then puts it back on her incorrectly, wrapping the woman's face. In the second episode, there is another South Asian woman who says or does absolutely nothing in the scene except that she is wearing a headscarf and Tracy is afraid that the woman is giving her a condemning look when in fact she could be looking over at the loud and blabbering customer who has just walked into the pharmacy and is describing sexual acts in a loud and explicit way. Also in the first episode, Tracy's sister (who is portrayed as sexually repressed) asks Tracy to not go to a party and instead play Ludo with her. The sister is holding a board game named Ludo. While a computerized version of this game has recently become popular, the board game has been popular among South Asians for a long time and was in fact derived from a game popularized by the Mughal emperors in India. On one hand, I can appreciate the struggle of Chewing Gum's main character with overly intrusive sexual thoughts as a result of the judgmental and restrictive culture that she grew up in, and her lack of sex education which resulted in her having unsafe sex and running to the pharmacy after the fact. When Tracy's religious boyfriend threw a book at her chest while she hadn't even touched him, it alluded to the violence often suffered by those who rebel against religious and cultural norms. However, just because Tracy's character is a Black, Christian girl, that doesn't make it ok for the show to direct negative puns at South Asian women who have done nothing wrong except wear headscarves in a place like London where South Asians and Muslims are a ethnic and religious minorities. This also creates the false stereotype of Muslims being South Asians, when in fact there are many Black Muslims.
Review of Chewing Gum
