From Animal Odd Couples to Oddkin: Probing Visual Representations of Interspecies Friendship through Critical Cuteness

The article explores the link between cuteness and animality, focusing on depictions of so-called animal odd couples, with emphasis on the effects cuteness may have for manipulating and flattening the life stories of real animals and obscuring the trauma that leads to the creation of cute imagery. After analyzing the vision of interspecies harmony in Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom, the article locates a shift away from the dominance of the sublime and toward the cute in visual depictions of peaceful interspecies encounters in American culture. Through a reading of three different versions of one narrative, James Oliver Curwood's Nomads of the North and the novel's two film adaptations, the article traces a genealogy of cuteness in representations of interspecies friendships and proposes a methodology called critical cuteness that makes it possible to alleviate the flattening of animals' stories effected by the aesthetics of cuteness. The methodology is based on exposing the incongruity between the affective functions of animal imagery and their ethological interpretation and on recovering the individual animals' life stories. Finally, the article suggests that the "cutification" of interspecies relations may be a strategy for diffusing the systematic violence meted out against wildlife during the colonization of the North American continent.