On ‘Cuteness’

The paper focuses on the ambivalent power of cuteness and offers a preliminarily sketched map indicating some of the possible intersections of cuteness and monstrosity. The main idea is that these two -seemingly distant and contradicted -realms can be read/understood one through the other. The basis for such an assumption is to be found both in cuteness' ambivalent aesthetics and multidimensional ethics. With respect to aesthetics, cuteness can be found both in the anatomy of a child and a freak (cuteness involves a certain malformation and exaggeration of infantile aesthetic diagram). As for ethics, cuteness can be thought of as a "sweet coating" that makes it easier to swallow bitter pill; it is in other words able to change meanings of ambivalent and simply negative issues, like violence or sexuality. Question that arises in the light of the abovementioned inconsistencies of cuteness is: Can we define the nature of cuteness as transformative -shifting the monstrosity not even to the realm of beauty (for a cruel beauty is something within the spectrum of monstrous emanations), but to the very space that is thought of as absolutely pure and sweet? According to common-sense definitional coordinates, cute and monstrous seem to inhabit distant and mutually exclusive realms. The Alien is by no means sweet and loveable, and you possibly couldn't call Winnie the Pooh shockingly cruel. We can tell a monster when we see it.

Cultural Studies, 2020

A review of the edited collection The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness by Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre and Diane Negra,

East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 2016

Approaching the cute object as a metaphor for the lovable, this article provides a survey of the different approaches to the study of cuteness and uses their intersections to map out a three-domain approach that incorporates the dimensions of affect, language and design. When considered in isolation, these domains highlight specific facets of cuteness, but their intersection underscores an important etymological tension that continuously transforms the metaphors of cuteness. These changes do not compromise the primary meaning of cuteness, but lead to a reinvention of the lovable, whereby the cute object continues to represent an abstraction of a particularly affectionate connection to the other. Therefore, the arguments presented will demonstrate that the notion of cuteness emerges through a particular etymological tension embedded in the idea of 'cuteness' that reifies aesthetic concepts through the relationship between the individual's affective experience and the operation of language through culture.

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.

Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 2006

A newly developed questionnaire revealed that there are four factors in adults' perception of children's cuteness: childlike behavior, children's imitation of adults, adults' protective feeling toward children, and children's physical attributes. Eighty-four childless undergraduates and 72 adults with at least one child watched a film of a five-year-old boy and girl dressed either in boyish clothes or girlish, and then assessed their cuteness using the questionnaire. The results showed that participants rated equally their feeling of children's cuteness regardless of having or not having their own children. Among the four factors of cuteness, childlike behavior seemed to operate most strongly.

Cosmetic, Aesthetic, Prophetic: Beyond the Boundaries of Beauty

Is cute beautiful? How is beauty inscribed or translated into cuteness, particularly in the context of contemporary consumer culture? In this paper, I question beauty within the aesthetic of cuteness by way of the emotional experience or affect shared between humans and the objects they consume. These include but are not restricted to digital pets, virtual partners and animated characters. The relationship between beauty and cuteness is not a given, but is rendered ambiguous in this inquiry. On one hand, to claim an object is 'cute' is to perceive it as lovable, a positive quality that fosters the 'nurturing consumer', according to product developers. On the other hand, cuteness is also an anthropomorphic project that humanises not by faithfully replicating a human form, but by selectively augmenting it. Cuteness is an aesthetic primarily concerned with smallness, which differs from glamour, majesty or other pompous figurations of beauty but, at the same time, simulates a deformity subjected to consumer preferences. By examining beauty through the technology of cuteness, I propose a playful aesthetics, or a dysfunctional beauty, that affects and compels one to act, to represent beauty and make it tangible, personable and claim it for oneself. In other words, cuteness speaks for beauty as transformation: a movement between forms and singularities, as opposed to a passive appreciation of a universal aesthetic in stasis.

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

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.

InVisible Culture, 2023

This review discusses the anthology, The Cute, edited by literary scholar Sianne Ngai. Focusing on the “minor” but now dominant aesthetic category of cuteness, Ngai’s book is one of the latest volumes in the Documents of Contemporary Art series co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.