[24] Joshua Paul Dale, “Cute Studies: An Emerging Field,” Text, April 1, 2016, https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1386/eapc.2.1.5_2.

[25] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (London; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1.

[26] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2007), 6.

[27] Joshua Paul Dale et al., eds., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2.

[28] Dale et al., 2.

[29] Dale et al., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness.

[30] Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” 37.

[31] Dale, 36.

[32] Dale, “Cute Studies,” 5.

[33] Ian Sample, “How Canines Capture Your Heart: Scientists Explain Puppy Dog Eyes,” The Guardian, June 17, 2019, sec. Science, paras.2-4, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/17/how-dogs-capture-your-heart-evolution-puppy-dog-eyes.

[34] Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” 50–51.

[35] Dale, 46–51.

[36] Dale et al., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, 2.

[37] Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43.

[38] Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” 827.

[39] Legge, “When Awe Turns to Awww... Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime,” 142.

[40] Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 2012, 64.

[41] Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018), 151.

[42] Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 2012, 64.

[43] Ngai, 65.

[44] Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” 816.

[45] Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), viii.

[46] Andreas Huyssen, “High/Low in an Expanded Field,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 367, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2002.0052.

[47] Cross, The Cute and the Cool, 44.

[48] David Ehrlich, “From Kewpies to Minions: A Brief History of Pop Culture Cuteness - Rolling Stone,” Rolling Stone, July 21, 2015, para. 2, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/from-kewpies-to-minions-a-brief-history-of-pop-culture-cuteness-20150721.

[49] Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 948, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.4.948.

[50] Ngai, 817.

[51] Cross, The Cute and the Cool.

[52] Cross, 43.

[53] Cross, 47–48.

[54] Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 261.

[55] Cross, The Cute and the Cool, 44.

[56] Cross, 51.

[57] Dale, “Cute Studies,” 6.

[58] Shiokawa, “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics,” 120.

[59] Mark Serrels, “Why Women Want To Have Sex With Garrus,” Kotaku, March 27, 2017, http://kotaku.com/why-women-want-to-have-sex-with-garrus-1793662351.

[60] Colin Schultz, “In Defense of the Blobfish: Why the ‘World’s Ugliest Animal’ Isn’t as Ugly as You Think It Is,” Smithsonian, September 13, 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-defense-of-the-blobfish-why-the-worlds-ugliest-animal-isnt-as-ugly-as-you-think-it-is-6676336/.

[61] Elaine M. Laforteza, “Cute-Ifying Disability: Lil Bub, the Celebrity Cat,” M/C Journal 17, no. 2 (February 18, 2014), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/784.

[62] Shiokawa, “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics,” 121.

[63] Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” 39.

[64] Rina Arya, Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 125.

[65] “Abicio,” in Wiktionary, accessed October 4, 2017, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abicio#Latin.

[66] Arya, Abjection and Representation, 190.

[67] Arya, 2.

[68] Arya, 3–4.

[69] Arya, 3–4.

[70] “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” 838.

[71] Hal Foster et al., “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the Abject,” October 67 (1994): 3–21.

[72] Krauss and Bois, Formless, 245.

[73] Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.

[74] Visions Of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.

[75] Fred Botting, “Dark Materialism,” Backdoor Broadcasting Company (blog), 2011, para. 1, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/01/dark-materialism/.

[76] Krauss and Bois, Formless, 244.

[77] Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 1.

[78] Luke Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities: On the Borromean Knot,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Theory, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998).

[79] Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 76.

[80] The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2017), 10.

[81] Fisher, 10.

[82] Fisher, 11.

[83] M. Mori, K. F. MacDorman, and N. Kageki, “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field],” IEEE Robotics Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 2012): “Editor’s Note,” https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811.

[84] “PARO Therapeutic Robot,” accessed April 24, 2019, http://www.parorobots.com/.

[85] Adam Piore, “Will Your Next Best Friend Be A Robot?,” Popular Science (blog), November 18, 2014, para. 39, https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/will-your-next-best-friend-be-robot.

[86] Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1–9.

[87] Casey Baseel, “Japan’s Unbelievably Buff Muscle Idol Shares Workout Videos, Performs Wicked Clothesline,” SoraNews24 (blog), May 9, 2019, para. 8, https://soranews24.com/2019/05/10/japans-unbelievable-buff-muscle-idol-shares-workout-videos-performs-wicked-clothesline%e3%80%90videos%e3%80%91/.

[88] Brian Ashcraft, “This Isn’t Kawaii. It’s Disturbing.,” Kotaku, August 23, 2012, http://kotaku.com/5937180/this-isnt-kawaii-its-disturbing; Patrick St. Michel, “The Rise of Japan’s Creepy-Cute Craze,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/the-rise-of-japans-creepy-cute-craze/360479/; Preston Phro, “Itami-Kawaii: Cute Gets Depressing, Inspires Japanese Twitter Users,” SoraNews24 (blog), February 24, 2015, https://soranews24.com/2015/02/24/itami-kawaii-cute-gets-depressing-inspires-japanese-twitter-users/; Omri Wallach, “Yamikawaii — Japan’s Darker and Cuter Version of Emo,” Medium (blog), March 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@omriwallach/yamikawaii-japans-darker-and-cuter-version-of-emo-d5c7a63af1f4.

[89] John R. Clark, The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 18.

[90] Hrag Vartanian, ‘A Startling Choice, Lisa Frank Is Selected for the US Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale’, Hyperallergic, 1 April 2019, para. 1, https://hyperallergic.com/492709/lisa-frank-2021-venice-biennale/.

[91] Kerstin Mey, Art and Obscenity (London; New York, NY: I.B.Tauris, 2007), 5–6.

[92] Mey, 6.

[93] Mey, 9.

[94] “What Is Obscenity Law? | Becoming an Obscenity Lawyer,” accessed April 21, 2019, https://legalcareerpath.com/obscenity-law/; “Art on Trial: Obscenity and Art: Nudity,” accessed April 21, 2019, https://www.tjcenter.org/ArtOnTrial/obscenity.html.

[95] Hiroshi Aoyagi and Shu Min Yuen, “When Erotic Meets Cute: Erokawa and the Public Expression of Female Sexuality in Contemporary Japan,” Text, April 1, 2016, 99, https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1386/eapc.2.1.97_1.

[96] Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds., “Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust,” in On Disgust (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 1.

[97] Smith and Korsmeyer, 2.

[98] Smith and Korsmeyer, 23.

[99] On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 71.

[100] The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, 42.

[101] Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” 41.

[102] Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” 827.

[103] On Disgust, 2004, 71.

[104] Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” 827–28.

[105] One Step Beyond: The Making of “Alien: Resurrection,” accessed April 24, 2019, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387469/.

[106] Parikka, “Medianatures,” 99.

[107] “Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 95.

As an emerging academic field, Cute Studies or Cuteness Studies encompasses interdisciplinary scholarship from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.[24] The term was coined by scholar Joshua Dale, who has promoted its development and dissemination by launching the online resource Cute Studies Bibliography, co-editing The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and editing the “Cute Studies” special edition of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, both in 2016. To date, other cute-centric academic publications include an issue on Internet cute by the M/C Journal (2014) and The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (2017), edited by Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao. The study of cute aesthetics in Western scholarship was pioneered in the 1990s and 2000s by cultural theorists such as Daniel Harris (Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, released in 2000) and Sianne Ngai (starting with “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde” in 2005), along with Sharon Kinsella, a sociologist specializing in the kawaii, and Garry Cross, who wrote the landmark history of American cute culture The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture, in 2004. Ngai’s scholarship of cuteness culminated in Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (2012), [Figure 6] in which she argues that cuteness reveals “the surprisingly wide specter of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities.”[25]

Ngai’s integration of cuteness within her broader project of examining the “politically ambiguous work of… emotions”[26] contributed to establishing cute aesthetics as a valid topic of research. Ngai’s “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” (2005), her earliest article on cuteness later adapted into a chapter in Our Aesthetic Categories, focuses on Japanese contemporary artists like Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo as hallmarks of cuteness’s dark side. In turn, Sharon Kinsella has published several essential books and articles on Japanese cuteness and girls’ culture, including the 1995 article “Cuties in Japan”—which remains a reference in many texts on kawaii aesthetics—along with Adult Manga: Culture and power in contemporary Japanese society (2000), Female Revolt in Male Cultural Imagination in Contemporary Japan (2007), and Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan (2013). Additionally, in 2010, anthropologist Marilyn Ivy penned “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo's Parapolitics,” published in the fifth volume of the animanga-centric academic journal Mechademia, a key paper examining the political significance of Japanese artist Nara Yoshitomo in light of kawaii aesthetics. Since then, during the span of the 2010s, there has been a general increase in papers focusing on Japanese cuteness, hailing from various academic fields.

In the second half of the 2020s, a notable contribution to the field of Cute Studies was the edited volume The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, published by Routledge in 2016, edited by Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony McIntyre, and Diane Negra. [Figure 7] This collection of essays offers a comprehensive view on the “explosion of cute commodities, characters, foods, fashions, and fandoms, leading to an inevitable expansion and dispersal of meanings and connotations”[27] in the twenty-first century. The authors put forth an understanding of cute affects, cultures, and aesthetics as “a repertoire that is made use of by a variety of constituencies and for a variety of purposes.”[28] The book breaks down the appeal of cute aesthetics in several elements: cuteness, coping, labour; cute consumption, nostalgia, and adulthood; cute communities and shifting gender configurations; cute compassion and communication; cute encounters: anthropomorphism and animals; spreadable cuteness: interspecies affect; political cuteness; cuteness and/as manipulation.[29] Dale, in particular, argues that cuteness is fundamentally “aimed at disarming aggression and promoting sociality,”[30] and that “antagonistic qualities such as violence, aggression, and sadism are not intrinsic to the concept of cuteness” but “are frequently attached to cute objects in the aesthetic realm.”[31] Although, for instance, Ngai’s analysis of the aggressive impulses aroused by the cute object is firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory and ethnographic observation—and, therefore, contrary to what Dale’s argument may suggest, not a detached fabrication of the artistic sphere—Dale’s case nevertheless cautions us against the hasty association of cuteness with “darkness.”

Before advancing, one may raise the question: what is cuteness? Cuteness can be understood on two different, if necessarily interconnected, levels. On the one hand, from a psychophysiological point of view, cuteness is an “affective response—a feeling one may refer to as the ‘Aww’ factor”[32] serving as an evolutionarily advantageous trait. This “natural” cuteness, understood as a primal, protective instinct towards neonates, is also not exclusive to humans, intertwining with the broader evolution of animals on Earth. In the 1940s, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz was the first to describe what he called kinderschema, or “baby schema,” a set of features and behaviors found in animals, including humans, indexing youthfulness and vulnerability, that trigger our nurturing instinct. [Figure 8] Lorenz’s kinderschema included big eyes positioned low in large heads with tall foreheads, a small mouth and nose, round ears, small chin, soft limbs and body, and a waddling gait. The Aww-factor can impact biological capacities; for instance, a recent study suggests that the millennial-long coevolution of dogs and humans has resulted in the latter developing a forehead muscle to produce the proverbial puppy dog eyes, i.e., a sad, imploring, juvenile expression.[33] Nevertheless, many scientists today argue that “instead of stemming solely from helplessness and dependence, cuteness is… intimately linked to companionship, cooperation, play, and emotional reactivity,”[34] suggesting it plays a role in motivating prosocial behavior, empathy, and disarming aggression.[35]

On the other hand, cuteness exists as a socio-cultural concept and, by extension, as an aesthetic category. This “second nature” of cuteness is relatively recent in human history, relating to the word’s emergence at the dawn of the twentieth century—although its roots can be traced back further, for instance, to Rococo’s fascination with the small and playful against Baroque's grandeur, encapsulated in works such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s L'Escarpolette, [Figure 9] or some Edo period paintings and prints in Japan.[36] According to historian Gary Cross,

Until the twentieth century, “cute” was merely a shortened form of “acute,” signifying “sharp, quick witted” and shrewd in an “underhanded manner.” In American slang of 1834, it came also to mean “attractive, pretty, charming” but was applied only to things. The original meaning of the “cute” person was interchangeable with “cunning,” a corruption of “can,” meaning clever or crafty. Significantly, both words shifted meaning by the 1900s (though only briefly for cunning), from the manipulative and devious adult to the lively charm of the willful child, suggesting anew tolerance for the headstrong, even manipulative youngster. Today, the little girl who bats her eyes to win favor or the little boy who gives his mother a long look of desire at the candy counter is called “cute.”[37]

Thus, as Sianne Ngai suggests, the word “cute exemplifies a situation in which making a word smaller, more compact, or more cute results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite.”[38] The cute indexes various meanings, including that which is attractive by means of smallness prettiness, or quaintness. In this sense, cuteness evokes the “toy-like or pet-like,”[39] tameness aligned with the limiting of the physical, formal, and philosophical scope of objects. For instance, the small is that whose size is less than average, and this “less than” or “lack” evokes another set of features that Ngai lists as “compactness, formal simplicity, softness or pliancy.”[40] [Figure 10] In fact, the kinderschema are, in and of themselves, a kind of “deformity” or “distortion” in relation to the “standard,” i.e., the adult, connoting immaturity, innocence, and dependence. On the other hand, the pretty is a “desintensification” or domestication of the beautiful, something which is appealing in a delicate and graceful way but removed from the solemnity of beauty as a central category in classical art—one could argue that the pretty is a cutification of the beautiful. In turn, the quaint “declaws” strangeness into that which is quirky, i.e., unusual or idiosyncratic in non-threatening, often adorable, sometimes, old-fashioned, ways.

Moreover, and albeit in an entirely different context (referring to sound), Brandon LaBelle’s account of weakness as, potentially, a euphoric and erotic (in the sense of a life-inducing impulse) condition, which “reveals us at our most vulnerable, a body without and in need,”[41] echoes Ngai’s definition of cuteness as “an aestheticization of powerlessness,”[42] i.e., as the depiction of “helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency”[43] as artistically or sensually pleasing, in ways that evoke our tender love and care. In this light, one can think of the cute as an intersection where the life instinct to nurture, protect, and love meets the minor, insignificant body and object. This structural disenfranchisement applies to the category of cuteness itself in relation to the Western art canon, as “a minor aesthetic concept that is fundamentally about minorness.”[44]

Cross also suggests that cuteness can “weaponize” these features as charm contrived with a view to desired ends. In this case, the cute becomes entangled with sentimentality and the self-indulgent appeal to tenderness and nostalgia. The iconic Crying Boys painting series by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin, an icon of kitsch mass-market art, epitomizes this relationship, but it could also refer to Margaret Keane’s paintings of big-eyed women and children, or the kitty and puppy calendars hanging in homes all over the world. [Figure 11a, b] These associations have put cute aesthetics squarely on the “dumb” side of what art and literary critic Andreas Huyssen famously called “the Great Divide”[45] between “high art” and lowly mass culture, a contested conceptual trope emerging in nineteenth-century Europe that has nevertheless proved to be amazingly resilient throughout the twentieth century.[46] Indeed, Cross argues that cuteness is intimately related to the birth of consumer culture, as it became “a selling point (especially when associated with the child in ads) and an occasion for impulse spending”[47] in emerging child-oriented festivities like Christmas, Halloween, and birthday parties. These were the beginnings of the cute as a commodity form, which over the twentieth and twenty-first century grew to enormous proportions, to the point that it has been called a “cuteness-industrial complex.”[48] The idea that, as argued by Ngai, cuteness has become one of “capitalism’s most binding processes,”[49] and therefore is no longer “merely” an aesthetic but an authoritative economic interest and value system, allied with the consumer goods sector, is essential throughout my dissertation, especially in regards to the development of the kawaii in Japanese society. It is at the core of all sorts of negativity and ambiguities spiraling from the cute commodity.

Cuteness is also a fruit of the modern mind, in particular, of modern developmental psychology, with its roots in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (namely, Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762) but emerging in the work of late-nineteenth-century psychologists, including Sigmund Freud. The fact that “children were no longer imagined as miniature adults or as naturally virtuous creatures”[50] resulted in a sociocultural shift in the public perceptions on childhood, replacing the passive Victorian child with mischievous rascal boys or cheeky coquette girls.[51] This shift meant that many emotions and behaviors which would be considered antisocial in adults—selfishness, jealousy, greed, manipulation, imitativeness, etc.—were not only tolerated but encouraged in the new “cute” kid.[52][Figure 12] Cross illustrates this uncanny, dual constructive and destructive nature of cuteness with examples of late-nineteenth-century American trade cards, in which children using a sewing machine to stitch together the tails of cats and dogs, or getting hit in the face with a baseball ball,[53] are shown to be cute.

But one could just as easily fetch the example of literary heroines such as Charles Dickens’s Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield (1850). David Copperfield’s first wife, Dora, is described as “pretty,” “little” (“little voice,” “little laugh,” “little ways”), “rather diminutive altogether,” and “childish.” She baby talks and throws tantrums, and is always accompanied by her spunky lapdog, Jip. [Figure 13] Although commonly understood as an “empty-headed child,”[54] Dora is self-aware and even tells David that he should think of her as his “child-wife” (e.g., “When you are going to be angry with me, say to yourself, ‘it’s only my child-wife!’ When I am very disappointing, say, ‘I knew, a long time ago, that she would make but a child-wife!’”). By acting childish and vulnerable, Dora—much like the practitioners of Japanese fashion and subcultures related to the kawaii—evades the responsibilities of married life and enfolds David in “a playful, unserious anarchic moment”[55] which is ultimately unsustainable in family literature (Dora, therefore, dies shortly into their marriage). Characters like Dora portray a budding admiration for the “slightly manipulative and self-centered girl”[56] in nineteenth-century urban society. Likewise, Little Nemo, Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse, or Betty Boop, embody the moral and aesthetical ambiguity, even disruptiveness, of cuteness in early comics and cartoons, initially targeted not at children but an adult audience, imbued with a modern sensibility. In Dale’s words, “when Mickey Mouse debuted in the animated cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928) he was mischievous to the point of cruelty.”[57] [Video 1]

Disconnected from the biodeterminism of Konrad Lorenz’s kinderschema, the “minorness” of cuteness performs in ways which are fundamentally contingent and relational. This is not to say that everything is (or can be) cute—as I have discussed above, cuteness evokes a word cloud or arena in which “diminutive,” “negative,”  or “formless” attributes combine with benign qualities: small, weak, helpless, pitiful, dumb, manipulative, young, pretty, quaint, playful, tame, adorable, and so on. But in the artistic and pop-cultural realm, cuteness often reflects the fact that “social and subcultural groups have their own (rather specific) criteria for what sorts of manners and attitudes constitute ‘cute.’”[58] For instance, the character of Garrus from the video game series Mass Effect, who is an anthropomorphic alien with insectoid features, is a favorite among the female gamer community for his cute awkwardness and vulnerability.[59] [Figure 14] Likewise, while relying on an aesthetics of precarity and imperfection which is far from being “conventionally” cute (attractive, pretty, etc.), many artworks produced within the trend of provisional painting might be considered “cute” in defying the aesthetic grandeur traditionally expected from artworks. Even the ugly can be cute, to some extent: the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest is an example of such concoction of  cuteness and ugliness, or the blobfish, voted the world’s ugliest animal in 2013 by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society,[60] [Figure 15] or even the cutification of disability in Internet celebrity cats like the late Grumpy Cat or Lil Bub.[61] Indeed, according to scholar Kanako Shiokawa, the non-descriptiveness of cuteness is central to cuteness’s contemporary acceptation.[62] In many respect, the kawaii, i.e., the Japanese cute, is particularly elastic, and a fertile ground for investigating the phenomeno-poetics of cuteness and negativity—what Joshua Dale calls the “dark side of cute.” As Dale puts it,

In art and popular culture, cuteness is entangled with a variety of other aesthetic categories and concepts, such as the abject, the formless, the uncanny, the eerie, the weird, the obscene, the grotesque, or the disgusting, with their own history and range. They share a “trajectory towards negation”[64] and alterity that aligns them more than separates them, prompting many overlaps. Abjection is a crucial concept in art theory, and one that underlines and manifests in many (if not all) of the encyclopedia entries and papers in this dissertation—albeit in radically different ways, from the eruption of cuteness in the dark web to the internalized foreignness of global manga, or the nonhumanity (the otherness) of cute characters and people. The word “abjection” comes from the Latin abicio, meaning “throw or hurl down or away, cast or push away or aside,” “give up, abandon; expose; discard,” or “humble, degrade, reduce, lower, cast down.”[65] At its most fundamental, the abject signals “the otherness in us,”[66] permeating both our mental processes and the social-cultural order.[67] While Julia Kristeva’s 1980 Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai Sur l'Abjection (in English, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) remains the definitive theory of abjection, there have been many significant contributions to its study, such as Hal Foster’s essay “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” published in the art journal October in 1996.

Bodily waste like urine, feces, and other “excretions” (in the sense of substances excreted from our bodies) like blood, semen, or breast milk, are prototypically abject. But the concept also refers to marginalized persons or groups that deviate from the norms of a society at a given moment in space or time, based on their appearance (gender, age, race, ethnicity, disabilities) or living standards (sexual orientation, class, religion, legal status). The duality creates a tension between the “abject” as a noun and “to abject” as a verb. According to scholar Rina Arya, author of Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature, “While the operation (of abjection) seeks to stabilize, the condition (of the abject) is inherently disruptive, meaning that there is a constant tension of drives.” And she continues: “The concept is both constructive (in the formation of identities and relationship to the world) and destructive (in what it does to the subject).”[68] The abject is therefore disruptive and unassimilable, threatening the stability of individual, social, and moral boundaries, as it undoes the distinction between the Self and Other.

Moreover, “the operation of abject-ing involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability,”[69] which apply not just to bodies or social groups but also art. For instance, “high culture” gatekeeps artistic purity by abjecting the “others” of taste and originality, like the kitsch or the plagiarized. Ngai argues that cuteness is abject in relation to the avant-garde, representing its greatest fear: powerlessness, “its smallness (of audience as well as membership), incompleteness (the gap between stated intentions and actual effects), and vulnerability (to institutional ossification).”[70] Still, according to her, the real power of both the cute object and of art itself ultimately resides in its powerlessness. In other words, the insistence on its radical uselessness is the sine qua non condition for the emergence of the avant-garde.

The extent to which the formless and the abject intersect has been the subject of debate. In 1994, the arts journal October published “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the ‘Abject’” by Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Helen Molesworth,[71] a roundtable on the formless and the abject, discussing their differences and similarities. Krauss points out how the abject is often reified into “a thematics of essences and substances,”[72] while the formless resists reification and therefore cannot be signified. Arguably, this interpretation of abjection is reductionistic; for Kristeva, the abject draws us “toward the place where meaning collapses,”[73] which aligns with Bataille’s declaration that “What it [the informe]designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.”[74] Nevertheless, one may trace a distinction of emphasis between the abject and the formless; the former, drawing from Kristeva's reading of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, emphasizes the shapeless in-betweenness of I and not-I, while the latter emphasizes the no-thing as itself kind of form(lessness), the “matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance” [75] inferred through its effects on outside observers. While the ties of cuteness to the formless are less obvious, I suggest it can be traced, for instance, in the “gleams and reflections”[76] of the big eyes of Japanese girls’ comics, whose wet and sparkly masses, enclosed by long lashes akin to a Bataillean spider, defunctionalize the eye as an organ of the visual system. [Figure 17]

There is a cluster of concepts that orbit the abject (or the other way around), namely, the unheimlich, as immortalized in Freud’s homonymous 1919 essay. Meaning “unhomely” in German, the unheimlich indexes an intimate alienation, which “can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.”[77] The unheimlich connects with Lacan’s “extimacy” (extimité), i.e., “intimate exteriority,”[78] which is not contrary to intimacy but instead posits that “that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”[79] In the posthumous The Weird and the Eerie (2017), Mark Fisher argues that, because “Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange,”[80] it is unreconcilable with related concepts, such as the weird and the eerie, that rely on that which “does not belong.”[81] Or, in the case of the eerie, that catches the human “in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces,”[82] an idea whose possible intersection with the cute I explore in the encyclopedia entry “Paradog.” [Figure 17]

The concept of unheimlich was famously used by Japanese robotics professor Mori Masahiro to describe the uncanny valley (bukimi no tani), a hypostasized “shift from empathy to revulsion” as a humanlike robot “approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance.”[83] As Dale points out, domestication is a crucial element in cuteness, and therefore the cute is always, in one way or another, about the tame and familiar, even when artists negate or subvert these qualities to an “unhomely” effect. The realization that such unsettling feelings do not necessarily detract from the “Aww-factor” further complexifies the interplay of the cute and the uncanny. For instance, the Japanese therapeutic baby seal robot Paro, designed to calm patients and treat depression at hospitals and nursing homes,[84] is quintessentially cute but also carries unsettling qualities—both in the mechanical-automaticness of its movements and utterances, and the ethical implications of replacing “real” human or animal love with a robotic “illusion of a relationship.”[85] [Video 2]

Other concepts encapsulating a sense of wrongness, such as the disgusting, the obscene, or the grotesque, have been given various degrees of importance either individually, or within the context of abjection. In art and literature, the grotesque has come to be associated with the carnivalesque and the macabre, the excessive, and the metamorphosis. In Japan, the interwar art movement ero guro nansensu (sometimes shortened to ero-guro) that celebrated decadence, violence, parody, and perversion, has been highly influential throughout the twentieth century, including in manga and anime.[86] Many subtypes of alternative kawaii culture, like guro-kawaii (“grotesque-cute”), kimo-kawaii (“gross-cute”), busu-kawaii (“ugly-cute”),  yami-kawaii (“sick-cute”), itami-kawaii (“pain-cute”), or the more recent mukikawa—a combination of mukimuki (“buff”) and kawaii headed by muscled idols like Saiki Reika[87] and Japan-based Australian singer Ladybeard [Figure 18a, b]—draw from this tradition, combining cute aesthetics with violent, depressing, burlesque, or otherwise contradictory imagery.[88] There is, however, another way in which cuteness can become grotesque. The word “grotesque,” from the Italian “grotto” (cave), originated in the fifteenth century when excavations of Emperor Nero’s ancient Roman palace Domus Aurea revealed bizarre paintings fusing human, animal, vegetable, and mineral.[89] Cute aesthetics often enables that kind of grotesquery. Take, for instance, Lisa Frank’s colorful illustrations of puppies, unicorns, dolphins, stars, hearts, rainbows, patterns, and whatnot. In these pictures, rather than appearing to be “proper” characters, all these clichéd, ossified formations seem to be molded out of the same nondescript, rainbowny substance, regardless of their being animals or objects, background or foreground, filling the entire surface in innervating visual amalgamations. [Figure 19] The cute yet outlandish allure of her figures and environments may explain why, although her company mostly produces stationery and stickers, Frank was selected to represent the United States at the forthcoming 2021 Venice Biennale.[90]

In turn, the transgression of social prohibitions and taboo links more closely to the obscene. The obscene evokes moral outrage and offense, in the form of objectionable practices, sexual (like incest, pedophilia, and necrophilia) or otherwise (war, poverty, racism, murder, and so on).[91] According to scholar Kerstin Mey, author of Art and obscenity (2007), the “‘obscene’ has been linked to the Greek term ob skene (‘off stage’), as violent acts in Greek theatre were committed away from the eyes of the audience: offstage, behind the scenes,” and it has come “to describe expressions that deviate from prevalent norms especially of ‘sexual morality.’”[92] It is important to note that the obscene is, among all these concepts, the one with a legal existence in the form of “obscenity laws that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century across Europe, followed by the USA towards the end of that century.”[93] Obscenity laws regulate and suppress materials such as images or speech that violate community standards of taste and decency. Their existence remains controversial, tackling with the limits of free speech, and bringing forth the question of who gatekeeps the “redeeming” value of obscene art.[94] Many artworks have been subjected to notorious obscenity trials, like William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the 1960s, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment in 1990. The most notorious intersection of cuteness and the obscene are the many forms of “erotic cute” in Japan, ranging from erocawa (or ero-kawaii) women’s fashion[95] to lolicon (“Lolita complex”) comics. [Figures 20 & 21] Possession of this kind of drawn erotica or pornography, which depicts minors in animanga style, has originated several court cases and convictions in countries such as the United States and Canada. It has also resulted in the banning of anime series like A Kite (1998) in Norway, Puni Puni Poemy (a 2001 spin-off of the popular Excel Saga) in New Zeeland, or Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (2013) in Russia.

Finally, disgust is primarily an emotional response to aversive stimuli that “helps to ensure the safety of the organism by inhibiting contact with what is foul, toxic, and thereby.”[96] Nevertheless, as Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith argue in their introduction to philosopher Aurel Kolnai’s 1927 On Disgust (Der Ekel, the first phenomenological treatise on this topic), disgust “is in fact a highly cognitive emotion, which provides information about features of the outer world not readily available by other means, and which also reveals something about the complexities and shadows of our inner psychic life.”[97] As such, disgust is not only a reaction to “decay and foulness in the sensory realm,” for instance, putrefaction or excessive vitality, “but also to moral decay and foulness of character.”[98] According to Kolnai’s view, disgust connects strongly to one’s ethical judgment, and, interestingly, one of his most distinctive object of disgust is “sentimentality, moral stupor, and even dull-witted gushing and reveling, the whole range of insolidity of the intellectual and moral life.”[99] This aspect is relevant to cuteness considering that, as Dale suggests, the surplus affect triggered by cuteness is redirected towards the beholder, who “takes pleasure in the intensity of this assault upon its sovereignty… in a form of linguistic or behavioral self-limitation”[100] manifesting as “cooing, squealing, exclamations of ‘Aww,’ and so on.”[101] Ngai also analyses the  “deverbalizing effect” of the cute in terms of a quasi-retributive movement. She writes, “in soliciting a response along the line of a murmur or coo, the cute object shows its ability to infantilize the language of its infantilizer, dissolving syntactic divisions and reducing one’s lexicon to onomatopoeia.”[102]

Ngai points out that this “soft gushing type”[103] of language (as Kolnai puts it) opposes the firmness and constancy privileged in the Western, post-Enlightenment construction of knowledge and meaning, and therefore—although generally a source of warm and fuzzy feelings—may elicit the moral disgust from those whose appreciation of art and culture operates within a phallogocentric framework.[104] In this sense, the aww-factor of cuteness and the yuck-factor of disgust share a prelinguistic move, whose bodily, subsemiotic effect on audiences results in their often being associated with inferior cultural positions. In pop culture, “pure” disgust tends to be overridden by the scary, the grotesque, or the ugly, namely in the horror genre (e.g., in films like Gremlins, 1984, and Child’s Play, 1988, staring the Chucky doll). I find the newborn Alien of Alien Resurrection (1997) to be an excellent example of “purer” disgusting cute. The Newborn is a human/xenomorph hybrid in which the alien is cutified with kinderschema. Its big dewy eyes and snub nose add an aww-factor to the film’s emotional narrative, as Ripley 8 is forced to destroy a creature who recognizes her as their mother while maintaining the yuck-factor in full force. [Figure 22a, b] The visceral sequence of live birth from a xenomorphic womb and the fact that the Newborn had hermaphrodite genitalia (removed in post-production for being too shocking[105]) heightens the disgust attached to the baby alien.

In the end, all these declinations of the categories of cuteness and negativity amount to unsettling or “bad encounters”[106] with works of art or pop culture in which the cute plays a significant role in shaping our thoughts, impressions, and feelings. As stated before, my encyclopedia focuses on the aesthetics of the kawaii because it offers the most advantageous site for exploring the dark and antagonistic qualities instilled in or aroused by cute objects. In part, this is a result of the kawaii, as an aesthetic of consumption or consumer aesthetics, being particularly entangled with Japan “as an improper nation-state.” As anthropologist Marilyn Ivy puts it, Japan’s “self-identification… with economic prosperity alone (and the identification by national others of Japan with that prosperity) is perhaps unprecedented,”[107] plunging the country into a state of (self-) abjection once it hit a wall of economic stagnation. Other aspects, such as gender roles and the strength of Japan’s comics and animation industry, likewise factor into the uniqueness of Japanese cute. For this reason, I will expand on the history of the kawaii, from its etymology to its roots in post-war and postmodern Japan.