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With apologies for crossposting. My fellow editors and I are delighted to announce the publication of a new book.

The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness

Edited by Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre, Diane Negra

310 pages

Paperback: 9781138998766 £24.99

Hardback: 9781138998759 £105.00

Cuteness is one of the most culturally pervasive aesthetics of the new millennium and its rapid social proliferation suggests that the affective responses it provokes find particular purchase in a contemporary era marked by intensive media saturation and spreading economic precarity. Rejecting superficial assessments that would deem the ever-expandingplethora of cute texts trivial, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness directs serious scholarly attention from a variety of academic disciplines to this ubiquitous phenomenon. The sheer plasticity of this minor aesthetic is vividly on display in this collection which draws together analyses from around the world examining cuteness’s fundamental role in cultural expressions stemming from such diverse sources as military cultures, high-end contemporary art worlds, and animal shelters. Pushing beyond prevailing understandings that associate cuteness solely with childhood or which posit an interpolated parental bond as its primary affective attachment, the essays in this collection variously draw connections between cuteness and the social, political, economic, and technological conditions of the early twenty-first century and in doing so generate fresh understandings of the central role cuteness plays in the recalibration of contemporary subjectivities.

1 The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Diane Negra

2 The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication,
and Agency Joshua Paul Dale

3 Cuteness and Control in Portal Megan Arkenberg

4 “This Baby Sloth Will Inspire You to Keep Going”:
Capital, Labor, and the Affective Power of Cute
Animal Videos Allison Page

5 “I’ll be Dancin’”: American Soldiers, Cute YouTube
Performances, and the Deployment of Soft Power in
the War on Terror Maria Pramaggiore

6 Live Cuteness 24/7: Performing Boredom on Animal
Live Streams Katy Peplin

7 When Awe Turns to Awww . . .: Jeff Koons’s
Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime Elizabeth Legge

8 Cute Twenty-First-Century Post-Fembots Julia Leyda

9 Designing Affection: On the Curious Case of Machine
Cuteness Joel Gn

10 Soft and Hard: Accessible Masculinity, Celebrity, and Post-Millennial Cuteness Michael DeAngelis

11 Affective Marketing and the Kuteness of Kiddles Joyce Goggin

12 Kittens, Farms, and Wild Pandas: The Impact of Cuteness
in Adult Gamble-Play Media César Albarrán-Torres

13 Under the Yolk of Consumption: Re-Envisioning the
Cute as Consumable Nadia de Vries

14 Ted, Wilfred, and the Guys: Twenty-First-Century
Masculinities, Raunch Culture, and the Affective
Ambivalences of Cuteness Anthony P. McIntyre

“Cuteness – a subject so benign, falling well below the radar of intellectual scrutiny – has now grown up to deserve its own field of serious scholarship, and this path-breaking compendium proves it. The Aesthetics and Affects of Cutenessestablishes the parameters by which this ubiquitous element may be given its full due built upon incisive analysis, social critique, and, importantly, fun.” Christine Yano, University of Hawai`i at Manoa

“This book’s provocation is clear: cute circulates in response to alienation. To understand the dynamics of today’s media environment, this essential new collection crosses disciplines, genres, and nations, showing the persistent desire for care, comfort, and LOLs in a screen-based world.” Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation

Joshua Paul Dale has edited a special issue of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture on Cute Studies and created an online bibliography for this emerging field. Dale teaches cultural studies at Tokyo Gakugei University.

Joyce Goggin is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches and conducts research in literature, film, television and media studies. She is currently co- editing a collection of essays entitled At the Intersection: Game Studies and Literary Theory to be published in 2017.

Julia Leyda is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She is co-editor of Extreme Weather and Global Media (Routledge, 2015) and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME, 2016).

Anthony P. McIntyre is an Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Dublin. He is finishing a monograph, Millennial Tensions: Generational Affect and Contemporary Screen Cultures.

Diane Negra is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten books. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she serves as Professor of Film Studies and Screen Cultures and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media.