The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness

Cuteness is a powerful affective register whose social proliferation since the turn of the millennium has been striking. When a Reddit user in 2014 asked Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, to name one use of the internet that he did not anticipate, he answered with just one word: “kittens” (BernersLee; Merriman). His widely quoted comment points to one of the incongruities that inspire this book: the avalanche of attention accorded to cuteness within popular culture juxtaposed with the notion that it is not a “serious” area of inquiry. Better understanding this paradox, in which the global phenomenon of cuteness is on the surface judged trivial based on the kinds of responses it often evokes, is increasingly urgent given the sheer range and rapid growth of “cute cultures.” In acknowledging the worldwide reach of cute aesthetics and affects, the essays gathered here constitute one of the first attempts to direct serious scholarly investi - gation to this pervasive phenomenon. Noting that prior streams of scholarship invariably separate cute aesthetics from cute cultures of emotion, this book seeks to pinpoint the relationship between this aesthetic and the affective responses it evokes. A fundamental question this volume addresses is whether or not cuteness is a function of subjective judgment, or a quality inherent to the objects we experience as cute, or a complex interplay between these two.