ABSTRACT
As the title of this volume indicates, cuteness occupies both the aesthetic and affective realms. As an affect, cuteness comprises a set of visual and/or behavioral characteristics capable of triggering a physical and emotional response in the body of the subject: what we may term the “Aww” factor. As an aesthetic category, this response is manipulated for a variety of purposes: commercial to be sure, but also artistic and self-expressive. The extant scholarship on cuteness tends to privilege one realm or the other. Quantitative analyses, which concentrate on affect, have isolated a specific set of stimuli that tends to cause a cuteness response in most people. However, this approach risks reducing cuteness to an autonomic, presubjective reaction that stands outside cognition, and thus apart from the produc - tion of meaning, the exercise of intention, and subjective agency in general. On the other hand, qualitative studies that privilege the aesthetic realm focus on cuteness as an aesthetic judgment, which emphasizes the agency of the subject encountering cuteness while defining cute objects as fundamentally passive.1
