The Politics of Cuteness

People don’t say something is cool anymore, at least not in my Brooklyn circles. They say it is cute. The culture industries swallowed up cool years ago, digested it and spat it out as product for fledgling consumers. For a moment, maybe, we can have cute as its replacement, although it works in a different way. Cool was meant to be about outsiders. Cute has no inside or outside: it’s all surface. Not surface in that 1980s postmodern way, which was about ironic play, parody tipped over into pastiche. Cute is a surface to sink into but, in sinking, you don’t fall to the bottom, as there is none. You sink into cute and become part of its surface.

The replacement of cool with cute in everyday speech implies a shift in aesthetic sensibility, although it’s a word that means several different – and even opposite – things. What I adore about Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic’s recently published Cute Accelerationism (2024) is that they make cute an aesthetic concept. They sift through the detritus of 21st-century media culture to find not just a pattern but a project: their book is, indeed, cute. Reading it gives me a fuzzy, giddy sensation, enjoyable and stimulating, like a vibrator on its lowest setting. I want it, and it also points to wanting something more.

When it’s cute, nobody fucks anybody and nobody cums. It’s all cuddles and snuggles, surfaces touching, layering, involuting, without penetrating. Not seduction but, rather, transduction. Cute may be flirty or even sexy, but to orgasm is not the objective. Cute appears unthreatening, but watch out! Those big eyes distract from the fangs. Cute aims to turn aside the finality of violence just as much as the finality of orgasm. The claw is cute’s last resort. It resists narratives that have stakes and closures, preferring to hover or circulate around a few emotional tones. In a game of rock paper scissors, cute chooses paper to envelop you, but will paper-cut you if necessary. Its tactics are non-oppositional, hence seemingly unserious. As Ireland and Kronic say, it ‘jellifies the aggressor into submisillybillyty’.

The cute is an egg that stays an egg, never hatching, remaining in potential. It doesn’t evolve, it proliferates. It has nothing to do with heterosexual reproduction, but it isn’t queer sex either. It’s a ‘skirt machine is plugged into a paw machine is plugged into a stubby tentacle machine’. Cute confounds family trees, conjoining parts of different species, including those that don’t (yet) exist, or it joins animate and technical components. Cute is exactly the kind of cyborg Donna Haraway, author of ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985), did not want.

Cute might also be what the fascist revivalists fear most. Unlike the ‘blue hair and pronouns’ antifa queers, cute can’t be opposed. One is always sliding over its surface, agency and action dissolving in its sticky, furry, shiny embrace. ‘Everything that the Great Compact to Save Civilization slates as degeneracy or barbarism smells like freshly baked mini muffins to us.’ Cute isn’t the death drive. It wants to stay larval, always the beginning, not the end. It reminds me of the role of myth in Kathy Acker’s writing, which was the always-unformed, a metamorphosis without end, taking place before finality and the law intervene to sort out one thing from another.

Can difference enter the world without risking death?

Cute is, in its own way, gendered. One of the repeating figures of cute is the girl. Cute is all that the girl might otherwise become, were she not shoved into the hetero machine of reproductive futurity, made to become a woman – meaning a wife and mother. Cute is all the other things she could potentially become, which is maybe why the girl in her cuteness appeals to many extremely online baby trans women. Even if a trans woman is straight, the possibility of wifedom and motherhood appears remote.

Cute reverses a certain feminist disdain for the girl as powerless, immature and infantilized. What if, instead, the girl was the path to evading the boredom of patriarchy? The visual artist Mary Catherine Starr created a viral sensation with @momlife_comics on Instagram, which detailed the everyday tedium and suppressed rage of the straight, white, married woman in friendly pastels. Maybe cis women might want to stay on the side of cuteness and girlhood, too.

Cute Accelerationism has nothing much to say about the violence inflicted on the girl, although it notes the very specific misogyny reserved for her. One which needs another name – girlphobia, perhaps. Ireland and Kronic bite like a chew toy on the French-Italian philosophical collective Tiqqun’s essay ‘Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl’ (1999). Tiqqun treats the girl as uniquely to blame for consumer culture, as if the shiny things men want aren’t part of the same racket. The sharp end of girlphobia is given in the title of Sergio González Rodríguez’s book The Femicide Machine (2012). The girl as disposable, even killable. Sometimes, the coy obtuseness of cute isn’t enough. There’s an unanswered question here about who gets access to the space of possibility of the girl and who is forced to grow up whether they want to or not – a fate reserved for a lot of trans women kicked out of the house and off the family computer.

Cute does have an answer to girlphobic violence in the figure of the beautiful fighting girl of anime culture. Cute but deadly, she meshes with the prostheses of war and postwar consumer culture. She refuses the narrative arc of conventional womanhood: her world is a boarding school from which she never graduates. The beautiful fighting girl is a fantasy of cute girl power, which does not make contact with those girls who are actually endangered. Ireland and Kronic: ‘Beneath the body that has been constructed for you, there is a richer field of possibilities, and some of them might feel cuter. And none of this is to do with identity, representation or resemblance.’ Yet, for all that potential, it’s striking how much the military-entertainment complex keeps spitting out versions of cute that are only the most minimal variations on each other. Cute is never really born and never really dies. Can difference enter the world without risking death?

The aesthetics of the beautiful trap its devotees in a cycle of striving and disappointment, even disgust, with one’s own body.

The aesthetic of cuteness is organized not around signs and their productivity of meaning, but around moe. The aesthetic of moe was popularized by Hiroki Azuma in his 2001 book which, in a somewhat belated English translation, is called Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2009). The meaning of the word moe itself is obscure; it might have emerged as a keyboarding error. Examples of moe in Azuma’s book include cats’ ears and loose socks – little character attributes that work as attractors, sticky points on the surface where affective attachments might nest. Moe, in turn, presupposes a database of existing moe, plus potential additional moe, out of which emerges this or that character. Neither characters nor narratives matter all that much anymore. On the one hand, the database aesthetics of cuteness break down the body into moe points. On the other, it replaces history with lore, with fantasy worlds of indifferent consistency. Cute is a surface on which every direction is sideways. Cute accelerationism is a kind of modernity without direction, time as the two-dimensional space of a database rather than the forward line of grand narrative.

While it might want to be something else, Cute Accelerationism is, in a sense, still modern – just with time opened up towards sideways temporalities. One sign of its unwitting repetition of modern figures is the place reserved in it for transfemininity. As Emma Heaney shows in The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (2017), transfemininity is a figure of modernity. Her examples are from Anglophone modernist writers, such as Djuna Barnes and James Joyce. The trans fem embodies all the potentials, good or bad, for rapid transformation of the social by the technical. One of Heaney’s provocations is that the modernist fascination with transfemininity as latent possibility ended up being recycled by queer theory, which loved the notion of transfemininity as gender play but was not so keen on actual trans women. It tended to see us as too literal-minded. Cue the bad takes on the New York ballroom documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) by Judith Butler, Tim Dean and – it has to be said – bell hooks.

For better or worse, ‘egg’ emerged as transgender slang for a trans person who has yet to come out. The transphobic backlash of our times wants to keep the egg from hatching, to force trans people to grow up and grow old in the gender assigned to them at birth. Some of us die in the egg. Some of us come out and get killed. There is a trans femicide machine, too. I get the utopian appeal of the cute ova perennially on the cusp of realizing a final form, but it’s also an image that hurts us.

Rather than the cute, I’m interested in a trans fem aesthetics of the pretty. I’m thinking for example of Tourmaline’s ‘Pleasure Garden’ (2021) series of self-portraits. Tourmaline, you could say, is beautiful. You could also say she is pretty. The two terms have something like a hierarchical relationship, with beauty supposedly being something higher. I want to reverse those terms, to make a case for the pretty – on the one side as an alternative to the beautiful, and on the other as an alternative to the cute. The pretty is neither cute nor beautiful, although, like those, it’s also feminized. The beautiful has at its imaginary core an impossible ideal form against which any realization of beauty in a human body, or really in any object, is going to fall short. The aesthetics of the beautiful traps its devotees in a cycle of striving and disappointment, even disgust, with one’s own body. Beauty traps you in relations of rank and envy with everyone else.

Beauty is a harsh discipline and mostly no fun, but easy to commodify. Not surprisingly, the closest human flesh ever gets to the tyranny of the ideal beauty is nearly always some skinny white woman. Ironically, some of the bodies most able to approximate the ideal form of beauty have been trans. Tall, low fat, small hips and breasts, narrow thighs, angular face: that is a trans woman. No shade to Hunter Schafer, but she often appears in photoshoots as feminine beauty’s avatar. There’s even a conspiracy theory called transvestigation which claims to unmask as trans popular female celebrities such as Taylor Swift.  

The pretty is not the beautiful. It has no ideal around which it orbits, no impossible normativity for which it yearns. The pretty is an art of making appearances specific to one’s own body. Pretty takes some work. As a trans aesthetic, pretty equates to cracking the egg, coming out, assuming a final form. It’s not an armchair aesthetic that contemplates surfaces, it’s a practice of making a body and its images. It’s the absurd leap, the roll of the dice, the seizing of the chance that life in another form might be possible – and might not.

Jane Schoenbrun’s film I Saw the TV Glow (2024) is the story of an egg that won’t crack. Two schoolkids bond over a TV show called The Pink Opaque, which is at once a world of cuteness and horror. For Owen, one of the kids, the show is a portal to the possibility of transition, but the leap never happens, and the result is a life devoid of any of the magic glimpsed in the surfaces of The Pink Opaque. Owen is cut off from the potential of becoming her pretty self, lives a life of abject boredom, comforted only by a big-screen TV – although we glimpse her pretty potential as a receding possibility at the film’s end.

The pretty as a trans aesthetic isn’t cute. This version of the larval stage may involve bruises and pain – I think of Elle Pérez’s photograph Mae (three days after) (2019), with her post-surgery bruises and scars. Like many trans people, I can honestly say that going on hormones saved my life, but it also fucked me up for a year or more. For me, ‘becoming-woman’ – at least as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari envisaged it in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) – wasn’t a matter of just reading Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903). I actually did it, after being in the egg for the longest time – a state less of virtual sublimity than of arrested death.

The trans fem aesthetic that resonates with me moves beyond the state of potential of the cute. It makes the flesh otherwise. Not so much the body as opposed to the image, but the body as image. Flesh is not something to which we have direct access. We experience it via a body schema, which, in turn, we don’t access directly either. The body schema appears when a body is in relation to another body. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, that’s always another human body but, per Cute Accelerationism, it could actually be any body at all, including that of a machine – a laptop or a phone, for example. I don’t think laptops and phones are always the best bodies with which to interact to come into awareness of one’s own body schema. They are extractive. Those machinic bodies harvest information from us, surveil us and sell us. The only becoming in which they are interested is the ever-expanding sameness of the information commodity form.

Beauty is a harsh discipline and mostly no fun, but easy to commodify.

Every relation of a body to another body is mediated. Being any kind of body at all, of any sex, cis or trans, involves the third sex of the machinic. But, perhaps, there are better technics via which to relate to other bodies and, via other bodies, to perceive one’s body schema and, having perceived it, to make it pretty. It’s why I prefer the rave to the internet. At least for a while, it gets us off our phones and puts our bodies in relation, pulsed by the sub-bass. Becoming cannot avoid the risk of death. The arrested development of the perpetual egg reproduces the sameness of that which is only ever a possibility. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. The pretty things emerge into the world to challenge it: to be forms without norms and not without a struggle.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘From Pretty to Cute and Back Again’

_{Main image: Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow, 2024, film still. Courtesy: A24}