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SAGE Open, 2021

An online survey was conducted to clarify the connotative meanings of the cute and the attitudes toward cuteness in three countries: Japan (n = 1,000), the United States (n = 718), and Israel (n = 437). The results show a remarkable resemblance in respondents’ conceptions of the cute (kawaii in Japanese and hamud in Hebrew) across countries. Except for slight cultural differences, the following common tendencies were found: (a) Cuteness is highly appreciated and believed to induce positive affective responses, (b) women tend to find things cute more frequently and strongly than men do, (c) animal babies are thought to be cuter than human babies, and (d) infants are found to be cuter when people get older, while older people generally show less positive attitudes toward cuteness. This study provides some evidence that the concept of cuteness and the feelings connected to its perception are universal.

Philobiblon. Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in the Humanities

The present paper aims to show the importance of analysing "cuteness" as a cultural phenomenon and to reveal the hidden meaning of "cute" / "kawaii" signs and symbols, omnipresent in the contemporary Japanese culture. Starting from Konrad Lorenz's "baby schema", elaborated in 1943, which revealed specific features that trigger the caregiving instinct, several cultural anthropologists and scholars like

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

Editorial, "Cute Studies", a special edition of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1992

ON 'CUTENESS' John T. Sanders JOHN MORREALL, in 'Cuteness',' argues that 'cuteness was probably essential in human evolution' because 'our emotional and behavioural response.. . to cute things. .. has had survival value for the human race'.2 Morreall states his 'guiding hypothesis' in the following terms: 'in the ' My text here, I guess, is Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Ugly Duckling'.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016

Cuteness in offspring is a potent protective mechanism that ensures survival for otherwise completely dependent infants. Previous research has linked cuteness to early ethological ideas of a 'Kindchenschema' (infant schema) where infant facial features serve as 'innate releasing mechanisms' for instinctual caregiving behaviours. We propose extending the concept of cuteness beyond visual features to include positive infant sounds and smells. Evidence from behavioural and neuroimaging studies links this extended concept of cuteness to simple 'instinctual' behaviours and to caregiving, protection, and complex emotions. We review how cuteness supports key parental capacities by igniting fast privileged neural activity followed by slower processing in large brain networks also involved in play, empathy, and perhaps even higher-order moral emotions. Cuteness for Caregiving, Empathy, and Beyond What is it about the sight of an infant that makes almost everyone crack a smile? Big eyes, chubby cheeks, and a button nose? An infectious laugh, soft skin, and a captivating smell? These characteristics contribute to 'cuteness' and propel our caregiving behaviours, which is vital because infants need our constant attention to survive and thrive. Infants attract us through all our senses, which helps make cuteness one of the most basic and powerful forces shaping our behaviour.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture, 2020

Kawaii and cute are increasingly prominent aesthetics in contemporary global culture. While Japan’s kawaii boom arguably began in the 1970s (Kinsella 1995: 220), it wasn’t until the late 20th/early 21st century that cuteness began to explode worldwide as the number of cute images, commodities, foods, fashions, and fandoms underwent rapid expansion (Dale 2017: 1). The new field of cuteness studies, formed to address this phenomenon, analyzes not only its history and development, but also the connection between cuteness and gender, race, ethnicity, age, nationality, politics, and interspecies affiliations. Its aim is to take seriously what is often dismissed as a facile commodity aesthetic because of its gendered association with femininity, childhood and the domestic sphere (Dale 2017: 2; Ngai 2012: 3).

2020

This thesis approaches cuteness as an aesthetic and affective genre which inspires intense feelings of softness and kindness, as well as aggression and possessiveness. It investigates the affective properties and uses of cuteness, the embodied experiences of interacting with cute animals and objects, along with the feelings of performing cuteness. Contrary to earlier research, which tends to discard cuteness as meaningless, demeaning and manipulative, this research shows how it can also function as radical, empowering tool for political activists and artists. Of particular interest is the political and resistive uses of cuteness, analyzed in three case studies. The ethnographic materials are collected on site in Sweden and in the UK, through a "mobile ethnography". This consists of shorter fieldworks centered on specific events; the Internet Cat Video Festival; Cuteness Overload-a feminist performance art project; and two cute-themed night clubs held at a leftist culture centre. The fieldwork emphasized multisensorial experiences of cuteness, focussed on participant observations along with interviews, focus groups and limited textual analysis. Drawing on affect theory, it understands cuteness as a relational category, emerging between subjects and/or objects. Of specific interest is the queering properties of cuteness functioning on several levels. It inspires radically lateral relationships between oppressed subjects; helps create safe utopian spaces; and lastly, it opens up new ways to experience and relate to one's own body. However, cuteness, like all aesthetic genres, is subject to the politics of taste. Not all cuteness production or consumption is given the same recognition. There exits then, a hierarchy of cuteness wherein some producers/consumers, and some expressions of cuteness, are more well-regarded than others. Ultimately, the thesis concludes, cuteness has the potential for radical transformation, but as it exists on an uneven playing field, this potential cannot be readily unlocked by everyone, at least not to the same degree.

Madhya Bharati, 2022

Cuteness is a powerful dichotomy and an affective register that sets a tirade of responses ranging from awe to awww. The importance accorded to it in popular culture contradicts with the notion that it is not a 'serious' area of reception. The worldwide phenomenon of `cuteness' is judged hastily by the kind of responses it often evokes, but given the range of and sheer growth of 'cute cultures' across the world, the social proliferation since the turn of the millennium has been particularly striking. Cute animal videos have been flooding Instagram and YouTube post pandemic lockdown. Sara Ahmed's concept of "happy objects" questions the spreading of certain forms of affect happiness and she says that such transmission can be attributed to objectifying cute animals as 'social goods'. Changes in culture surrounding 'companion species' by Donna Haraway talk about how increase in emotional precarity leads to an increase in neoliberal logics of consumption. This article addresses the question as to whether or not cuteness is a function of subjective judgement or if it is a quality inherent to the objects one perceives as cute. Keywords-Cute Studies, Affect theory, Companion Species, Anthropomorphism Concept Note The notion of cuteness is constantly evolving and undergoing notable migration into hitherto unseen forays and institutions that are considered to be the land marks of high culture. Public spaces like museums, galleries, subways are all being increasingly materialized with cute rhetorics and images. This constitutes a performative aesthetic culture and a form of communication for the consumeristic society that seeks to enact, represent or rephrase cuteness (be it positive or negative). This is controlled by factors of self-representation, affiliations with fan culture and other collective modes of representation. The power vested in these sources navigate between the subject affected by 'cuteness' and a visibly powerless 'cute' object. This has serious implications when it is expressed through variables like gender, race, class and species. The word 'cute' dates back to the 1850s in American and British English where the term was associated with children, women, domesticity and referred to a particular form of "feminine spectacle". This paved way for the rapid rise of 'cute culture' in the twenty-first century which