Why study cuteness?
The Cute Studies project
Cuteness is everywhere in today’s interconnected world.
We tweet strings of emojis and google on our Apples.
Cats rule the Internet, and the Pokémon franchise is more profitable than Star Wars: even with the arrival of baby Yoda.
Yet the cute often flies under our radar, overlooked and understudied.
Cute and kawaii
Cuteness is an everyday aesthetic. It’s something we can enjoy in our daily lives, like eating an artfully created meal or appreciating the clean smell of laundry dried in the open air. Though cuteness has proliferated widely in the global Internet age, it remains relatively unstudied.
The main aesthetics of cuteness are American cute and Japanese kawaii. Though interest in them is building, the Cute Studies project is the first to analyze their relationship and contemporary expressions through a historical lens while also drawing insights from the empirical sciences. The project addresses the following questions:
How did the historical development of cute and kawaii influence their contemporary expression?
How is the Western reception of Japanese kawaii influenced by prior exposure to American cute?
How are constructions of gendered identity shaped by these two aesthetics of cuteness?
How do cute or kawaii logos, mascots and “character goods” both enable and conceal the operation of institutional power?
How are these aesthetics of cuteness used to trigger consumption in the era of “affective capitalism,” in which emotions are manipulated for profit?
How do robotics and AI employ the cute and kawaii aesthetics to mediate social interactions between humans and technology?
This is the first research project to systematically trace the distinct histories of both the cute and kawaii aesthetics and to study their contemporary interrelationship while also accounting for their differences.
About me
Joshua Paul Dale, Ph.D.
is a professor at Chuo University in Tokyo. He is the founder of the new academic field Cute Studies (aka Cuteness Studies). Dale specializes in the history, development and contemporary expressions of the cute and kawaii aesthetics.
Dale is the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Changed the World (forthcoming from Profile Books on Nov. 9), and was awarded a JSPS grant to research the cute and kawaii aesthetics. He is a co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (Routledge Press); and the editor of Cute Studies, a special issue of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP20K00145
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s)’ organization, JSPS or MEXT.
