ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has depicted cuteness as an aesthetic category fraught with ambivalence. Sianne Ngai observes that cuteness provokes urges towards both “domination and passivity, or cruelty and tenderness” in its viewers (108), and other scholars note that cute objects can retain their cuteness even as they acquire additional, seemingly incongruous traits, such as “freakishness” (Merish 188), deadliness (Shiokawa 119), and monstrosity (Brzozowska-Brywczyńska 218-21). It is surprising, then, considering the range of its affective and aesthetic paradoxes, that cuteness is so frequently described as simple and unsophisticated-as an aesthetic that we “discern easily and react to automatically” (Morreall 46). If cute - ness appears to act systematically, however, this capacity has important implications for the aesthetic’s role in contemporary life. Indeed, the cute objects that populate our world move within a number of controlling systems, from economic systems of valuation and exchange to the systems of circulating emotion that Sara Ahmed has called “affective economies” (119). With its capacity to viscerally generate affects, the supposedly minor, ambivalent aesthetic of cuteness in fact plays a powerful role within the structures of modulation that-as Deleuze has arguedconstitute power’s primary channels in “societies of control” (4).
