{"id":12793,"date":"2015-05-07T23:24:29","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T23:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/cuteness-is-a-way-of-aestheticizing-powerlessness\/"},"modified":"2015-05-07T23:24:29","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T23:24:29","slug":"cuteness-is-a-way-of-aestheticizing-powerlessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/cuteness-is-a-way-of-aestheticizing-powerlessness\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and\/or weak, which is why cute objects\u2014formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening\u2014get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there\u2019s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as people like Daniel Harris have noted. The prototypically cute object is the child\u2019s toy or stuffed animal.<\/p>\n<p>Cuteness is also a commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption. As Walter Benjamin put it: \u201cIf the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.\u201d Cuteness could also be thought of as a kind of pastoral or romance, in that it indexes the paradoxical complexity of our desire for a simpler relation to our commodities, one that tries in a utopian fashion to recover their qualitative dimension as use.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p>Sianne Ngai, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cabinetmagazine.org\/issues\/43\/jasper_ngai.php\">in an interview for\u00a0<i>Cabinet\u00a0<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n<p>(I read this about a year and a half ago, and I still think about it; it\u2019s very interesting to me)<\/p>\n<p>Oh I remember our conversation about it! Wasn\u2019t it one of our early ones? <\/p>\n<p>Pastoral romance is a good turn of phrase. Utopia and cuteness seem counter-intuitive to me at this point more so than before. Hmm.<\/p>\n<p> (via <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/arabellesicardi.com\/\">arabellesicardi<\/a><\/p>\n<p>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and\/or weak, which is why cute objects\u2014formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening\u2014get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there\u2019s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3kl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}