Baudrillard and Cuteness
ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 7, Number 1 (January, 2010)
Author: Dr. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
I. Cuteness, ‘Girlieness’, and Female Empowerment
At the turn of the millennium international youth culture is deeply influenced by the Japanese
aesthetics of kawaii or cute which is distributed internationally by Japan’s powerful anime
and manga industry. The popular aesthetics of kawaii developed during the 1980s and by late
1990s had evolved into an explicit culture (Augier, 2006) of which Pokemon™ animals seem to
be the most original symbols. Kawaii culture arose in the realm of manga through the typical
image of the shùjo (young girl), which immediately sparked the production of a large range of
cute paraphernalia meant for female consumption. Though most analysts would put forward the
intrinsically positive and charming aspect of kawaii, there exists also a dark and decadent side
of kawaii, which reaches from anomie and hypocrisy to the grotesque, erotic, and violent. One of
the most interesting features of kawaii is that it is able to unite contradicting tendencies and
values in one single concept.
Kawaii emerges as a peculiar notion that has no equivalent in Western culture except perhaps
that of cool; but its equivalent is definitely not “cute”. Gary Cross has shown, in his comparative
study of cool and cute in American culture, that a clear concept of cuteness emerged around
1900 when it had become possible to see the “bubbling enthusiasm of the child” as charming and
even desirable. Here the cute entirely lost its connotations of ‘shrewd’ and became “the look of
wondrous innocence” (Cross, 2004:43). Kawaii, on the other hand, is not cute but must be
understood as a female empowerment similar to that provided by fashion, eroticism or, more
recently, tattoos. In other words, kawaii is not merely a method of escaping reality but rather a
means of establishing a new kind of reality. Kawaii does not simply elude the work ethics of its
society but girls “can make themselves ‘cute’ by working hard at it” (Shiokawa, 1999:107).
Kawaii as a liberation project is supposed to have an effect on the real world, which means that it
has real value connotations. “Cute is a virtue and, in an oddly paradoxical way, [it is] strength”
(Shiokawa, 1999:107). Kawaii is by definition a contradiction in terms because it reunites within
one frozen, imperturbable state antagonistic qualities like submission and subversion,
participation and non-participation. These patterns of a new type of feminine empowerment
become also more and more common in Western culture, challenging the traditional ideology of
femininity, which includes neatness, diligence, appliance, and passivity, and replaces it with a
slightly more sexual ideology. Worldwide, the self-sacrificing female has ceased to be a role
model in pop culture and has been replaced by the “strong woman” whose sources of power are
no longer classical femme fatale strategies, but rather an exaggerated type of cute or “girlish”
femininity. At the moment, popular psychology and alternative cultures preach self-growth,
freedom, independence, and empowerment as the supreme values that any individual can attain,
cute styles are likely to arise in many places.
Susan Hopkins describes, in her book on “Girl Power”, how a post-punk and post-feminist
environment has produced the cute but powerful girl-woman, that is, the heroic female
overachiever (Hopkins, 2002:1) who knows how to make things happen, is not afraid of what
men think, but still insists on a “girlish” aspect that helps her to gain even more personal power.
Hopkins introduces the Spice Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the animated characters of
Powerpuff Girls, Princess Fiona from Shrek, and many others as examples of postmodern
“power girls.” The Spice Girls especially “combine feminine sexuality with cartoon-like
innocence” (Ibid.:20), a mixture that comes closest to Japanese kawaii aesthetics. Hopkins shows
that girl power can go very far. The postmodern powerful woman is able to embrace her own
exploitation in a “cool” and controlled fashion in order to obtain immense financial profits. A
campy form of irony that old school feminists find irritating enables these women to ‘eat your
cake and have it:’ Fashion models are prime examples of this kind of girlieness because they are
“objectified but their objectification is typically read as empowering” (Ibid.:104).
Hopkins defines girlieness as a mixture of femininity and the desire for power and finds many
simultaneously cool and cute female action heroes in Western popular culture – many of whom
are even equipped with supernatural powers. The playful postmodern girl pretends to be
“vulnerable or passive” though, at the same time, constantly conveying the image of an iron
perfection, of being “cool, detached and seriously ambitious” (Ibid.:103).
II. Baudrillard’s Dolls and Kawaii Shùjos
Baudrillard’s ([1976] 1993) elaborations on the fetishistic aspect of sexuality and the
transformation of women into objects (dolls) touch upon the theme of cuteness. At times it can
seem that the cute shùjo, as a self-sufficient, non-productive being who has nothing but itself as
an end and who engages in an endless inflation of signs, has sprung right from Baudrillard’s
theories.
Analyzing the aesthetics of striptease, for example, Baudrillard emphasizes those aspects of
eroticism that concur with women as untouchable goddesses (Ibid.:107) and his insistence on the
“woman’s autoerotic celebration of her own body” (Ibid.:108) as a necessary condition for
female eroticism. This evokes aspects of the ambiguous eroticism of the shùjo as a being
originally and firmly embedded in a purely feminine world. Baudrillard supports the existence of
erotic women as narcissistic and passive creatures with the help of a quote from Freud who held
that a women’s need does not “lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who
fulfils this condition is the one who finds favor with them” (Ibid.:111).
At first sight it appears that if we follow Baudrillard’s prescriptions, we will
designate kawaii eroticism as it appears in shùjo manga as the most genuine form of all female
eroticisms. The erotic, for Baudrillard, is the “transubstantiation of profane (realist, naturalist)
nudity into sacred nudity,” always maintaining a “sensual distance” created through an autoerotic
aspect that allows erotic scenes to appear “like in a dream” (Ibid.:108). In erotic events like the
striptease, for example, the woman adopts “the neutralized gaze of auto-erotic fascination of the
woman-object gazing at herself with her eyes wide open, then closing her eyes on herself”
(Ibid.:109). At the very end, this process of transubstantiation turns the body into a smooth doll,
compared, in the most Freudian fashion, with the phallus because the body emerges “more and
more as a phallic effigy to the rhythm of the strip” (Ibid.).
The description of the phallus as a smooth and closed object overlaps with Morreall’s classical
definition of the cute object (large head in relation to the body, rounded body shape, soft body
surfaces, etc. (Morreall, 1991:40); or it overlaps with kawaii as an object without bodily orifices
(Kageyama, 2006). For Baudrillard, “it is necessary and sufficient that [the woman-fetish or doll]
be as closed as possible, faultless, without orifice and ‘lacking’ nothing” (Baudrillard ([1976]
1993:104).
Once the main objective of eroticism has become the creation of a fetish, everything else will
merely be a matter of body discipline with the phallus as the ultimate model. Then the erotic
woman emerges as a smooth phallus-doll not because she has submitted to some “male spell” but
because women “perform this labor of continual fetishization on themselves” (Ibid.:110). It is
even their feminine privilege to do this because only women can adopt those smooth doll-like
features while the male body “can never really become a smooth, closed and perfect object since
it is stamped with the ‘true’ mark…” (Ibid.:104).
The question is whether Baudrillard’s doll overlaps with the kawaii shùjo. Yes, if we look only at
the self-fetishizing processes that lead to the production of both the doll and the shùjo. No, if we
look at the results of both processes. Taken to an extreme, Baudrillard’s erotic cuteness, which is
entirely based on closure and the denegation of ambivalent extremes (Ibid.:105), is far too
abstract and comes much closer to the cold vitrification of the eroticism presented in the
advertisements of a fashion brand such as Diesel. Here women are erotic though at the same time
expressionless and empty as they adopt frozen postures; their eyes staring into nothing and their
faces as if made up with wax. The uncanny brand of narcissism attached to these women via the
Diesel texts supports Baudrillard’s thesis of disciplined self-referentiality leading to a smooth
and cute erotic body because the entire publicity campaign is – ironically – called “how to stay
young forever.” In other words, Baudrillard’s idea of cuteness includes the component of selfreferentiality and narcissism but excludes the possibility of female empowerment.
Baudrillard’s cute is cold, but fails to integrate the coolness that is part of the contemporary
girlish type of cuteness. The reason is that his conception of the cute remains linked to the
Western conventional understanding of cuteness and ignores the most original qualities
of kawaii. Baudrillard does not perceive the links between cool and cute as humanist
expressions. If bodies are only smooth and self-enclosed, any human aspect intrinsic
to kawaii disappears. It is surprising that this thinker who has recognized cool as a pure play of
values, will turn the erotic into a cute but cold fetish instead of entirely leaving it within the
domain of playful interaction.
When it comes to the definition of the erotic gaze of the self-fetishized woman, however,
Baudrillard fares much better because his explanations concur with his general system of erotic
reality as an empty exchange of signs and of a commutability in which everything remains
indecisive. Here empowerment is possible. “Dreamily, proceeding anagrammatically, that is to
say, [the gaze] does not advance from one term to another, from one organ, juxtaposed and
connected to another like words by the thread of a functional syntax” (Ibid.:120). Baudrillard
explains that this is not the “willed cool” (of models), but the cool which abandons itself
becoming a “specific quality” transcending all distinctions between hot and cold. This is in
keeping with Baudrillard’s descriptions of an essential indifference or neutrality towards the
meaning of codes in modern society, enabling the commutation of signs into a variety of
significations. Baudrillard believes that “this process … has for a long time been at work in
culture, art, politics, and even in sexuality” (Ibid.:9). Kawaii culture, as well as the Girl Power
phenomenon described by Hopkins, act within this paradoxical vacuum in which assertive power
most effectively speaks through an elusive web of meanings. Also Hopkins’s empowered women
are “both radical and conservative, real and unreal, feminist and feminine” (Hopkins, 2002:6).
Cuteness must be defined along these lines. Strangely enough, Baudrillard’s vitrified dolls do not
offer this multi-dimensional aspect. To probe deeper into why this is the case it might be a good
idea for research to pursue these questions with his important understanding of seduction in
mind.
About the Author
Dr. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Tuskegee University,
Alabama, USA
References
Natalie Augier (2006). “The Cute Factor”, New York Times (January 3rd).
Jean Baudrillard ([1976] 1993). Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage.
Gary Cross (2004). The Cute and the Cool. Wondrous Innocence and Modern American
Children’s Culture. Oxford University Press.
Susan Hopkins (2002). Girl Heroes: The New Force in Popular Culture. Annandale, Australia:
Pluto Press.
Yuir Kageyama (2006). “Cuteness – A Hot-Selling Commodity in Japan”, Washington
Post (June 14th).
John Morreall (1991). “Cuteness”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 31, Number 1:39-47.
Kanako Shiokawa (1999). “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics” in John
Lent (Editor), Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy. Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press:93-125.