The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde

Ngai,

doi:10.2307/3651437

Cited by 20 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…This includes what Jamie Lorimer () has called “non‐human charisma” and aesthetics like cuddliness and cuteness, which trigger strong emotional responses. Sianne Ngai () describes the aesthetics of cuteness, and suggests it accentuates helplessness and vulnerability. Innocence shares many of its formal properties with cuteness, organized around small, helpless, abject, or deformed objects: for instance, large eyes that evoke distress.…”

Section: Expansions Of Innocence the Innocence Of Expansionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A world without innocence

Ticktin

2017

American Ethnologist

159

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A world without innocence A B S T R A C TWhat exactly is innocence-why are we morally compelled by it? Classic figures of innocence-the child, the refugee, the trafficked victim, and the animal-have come to occupy our political imagination, often aided by the important role of humanitarianism in political life. My goal is to see how innocence, a key ethico-moral concept, has come to structure what we think of as politics in the contemporary Euro-American context-how it maps political possibilities as well as impossibilities. The centrality of innocence to the political imagination is shaped by a search for a space of purity, one that constantly displaces politics to the limit of innocence and thereby renders invisible the structural and historical causes of inequality. We need, then, to open up political, moral, and affective grammars beyond innocence.

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Section: Expansions Of Innocence the Innocence Of Expansionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A world without innocence

Ticktin

2017

American Ethnologist

159

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“…Our feelings might be more 'ordinary' and so we might be mildly pleased rather than delighted and mildly irritated rather than angered during the course of our interaction with a cultural object. Sianne Ngai's (2005Ngai's ( , 2012 draws attention to the significance of trivial or 'minor' aesthetic categories and she argues that most of our expressions of taste are not necessarily made with conviction. So, we need to consider the differing levels of intensity experienced in the act of tasting.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value

Stewart¹

2013

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“…Theory is provoked by semiotic trends and ambitiously establishes their meaning at the national or gender level, but ultimately remains conflicted over the explosive indiscretion of semiotic events. As cute to avant-garde sentiments (Ngai, 2005), immaturity/childishness/ puerility/adolescence to the average consumer will appear a radically unsettled matter of violent objectification, poetic address and esthetic agency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The semiotic predicament of developmental psychology

Janssen¹

2010

Subjectivity

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This article critically assesses various proposals for a cultural semiotics of maturity and developmental stages. Semiotic theories consider developmental subjectivity as a function of a person's progressive immersion into sign systems, and are key to a denaturalization and contextualization of the life-staged subject. A semiotic understanding of maturity inspired by the post-Marxist work of Jean Baudrillard suggests that neo-Marxist indictments of consumer society as alienating individuals either by 'hurrying' or infantilizing them, is complicit with a more profound and ambient naturalization of life stages. However, a look at Japan's 'cute culture' (kawaî karucha) is taken to suggest that both developmental psychology and its critique, may be, importantly sidetracked by late capitalist mass production and circulation of maturational markers. Various implications of this case study for developmental psychology are discussed.

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The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

A world without innocence

A world without innocence

A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value

The semiotic predicament of developmental psychology

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