Cuteness II: Race, Gender, and Queerness
Introduction
In the first part, cuteness was established as a permeating construct throughout our neurobiology. In this piece, the concept of cuteness in identity through gender will be discussed. Scholars have been working on the way that society genders different things, from colors to clothes to shapes and even academic subjects. The intertwining of cuteness and gender is inevitable in a world that reaches for categorization as much as possible.
Cuteness in the Traditional Gender Binary
Typically, cuteness is also associated with concepts of purity, vulnerability, softness, demurity, and otherwise harmlessness. To be someone “cute” is often synonymous with the above attributes/traits. As such, cuteness is typically tied to two main groups of people: women and children.
In the first part, we discussed how cuteness triggers responses of warmth, happiness, and wanting to protect (Kringelback, 2016). Evolutionarily, it was advantageous for children to be perceived as cute since it would lead to greater protection while they were still largely vulnerable by themselves. One scholar details the “cute-feminine stereotype”, which arises from the overlap of traits found in both cuteness and femininity (eg. roundness, softness, warmth, caregiving, etc.) (Wells Keller, 2022). As such, the gender binary would thus coin anything directly opposing these to be masculine and therefore not cute (e.g., sharpness, toughness, cold, aggressive, etc.). By leaning towards cuteness in appearance, one is inevitably leaning toward a more feminine aesthetic.
The adjective “cute” has become a standard for describing a person that one finds attractive. One source describes the meaning of being called “cute” as it refers to one’s warm, endearing, and otherwise charming aura (Pace, 2024). Many popular sources, such as WikiHow, Quora, and Reddit, have also made a point to create a distinction between “cute” and “hot” when talking about attractive people: the key difference is that the former does not exude sex as the latter does. The main takeaway here is that there is one consensus in these discussions involving cuteness associated with something pure, childlike, innocent, and vulnerable. This involves a lack of sexual appeal and often being perceived as being younger. Internet users have also evolved this into discourse about approaching being perceived as “cute” but not “hot” and vice versa. In stereotypically Western beauty standards, an adult looking for a romantic and sexual partner usually leans towards “hot” as opposed to “cute”; this is not necessarily the case in other cultures, where there is an emphasis on appearing cute over exuding sex in one’s appearance. In Japan, for example, the desirable aesthetic is considered to be cuteness (and has been since the 1970s), and there is a considerable emphasis on the asexuality of the ideal woman: chastity, modesty, and a lack of sexuality, combined with nurturing and submissive temperaments is considered the ideal woman (Miller, 2006; Gray, 2022).
Cuteness, Gender, and Race
In the discussion of cuteness and gender, the concept of race is also brought into question. Mainly, scholars have argued that the concept of cuteness is entwined with perceptions of racial groups; thus, the perception of cuteness in some cases arises from previously conceived notions of the members of a racial group (Mcintyre, 2020). For example, the cuteness associated with the East Asian kawaii aesthetic has roots in the complex history between diasporic Asian identities in the West and the hypersexualization of East Asian women as well as the emasculation of East Asian men. Leslie Bow (2019) describes cuteness as a tool to mitigate the Yellow Peril in the West. Furthermore, the depiction of heroines in media is described to utilize cuteness in order to make “her power and independence more palatable” to an audience that would otherwise be repulsed by a woman who is “too powerful”. Bow further on brings up the juxtaposition of cuteness as perceived in the West as well as the way that consuming cuteness in Japan by young women is seen as a form of rebellion and independence, by deliberately infantilizing oneself in order to establish control over their identity and accepting a “gender-circumsized role” through cuteness.
Furthermore, the confounding of Black women’s femininity and historical oppression of Black people in the West forces Black femininity to oversubscribe to traditional Eurocentric standards of femininity in order to be perceived as such; stereotypes of Blackness equating to aggression, and otherwise dehumanization, create even more pressure for Black women to adjust themselves to follow White-Eurocentric norms to be perceived as women. A 2009 study analyzed facial features in CEOs and found that having a baby face worked positively for Black men and negatively for White men. The study subsequently dubbed this the “teddy-bear effect,” where successful African American leaders possessed “disarming” characteristics that would reduce feelings of threat in their non-Black counterparts (Livingston, 2009). Another famous study, known as the “Doll Test” by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, demonstrated the way Black children would still prefer white dolls over black dolls, attributing tags like “good” and “pretty” to the former while attributing “bad” and “ugly” to the latter (Clark & Clark, 1950). These two studies demonstrate an interplay between cuteness and race, illustrating the way in which cuteness, often considered in the realm of white-adjacent, plays into the oppression faced by African-Americans in a white-dominant society.
Cuteness in the LGBTQ+ Community
Cuteness in the queer community has not yet been thoroughly studied by academic scholars, however members of the community have created discourse on their own observations for how the cute aesthetic intertwines with their queer identities. One user writes about the way that the queer-non-binary “look” being perceived as cute is associated with a failure to “adult” since the cute qualities of the aesthetics associated with the queer and non-binary community communicate childhood and an otherwise rejection or avoidance of adulthood (Queertopia, 2020). The user goes on to describe the way that cuteness in the queer and non-binary community might have to do with the way that a third, non-binary gender has not previously been associated with sexualization; there are several stereotypically feminine and masculine characteristics in the form of physical and behavioral attributes, which have been attached to sex in one way or another in a way that non-binary characteristics have not. Thus, the user explains, there is no mechanism to attach sex to non-binary gender, making it more adjacent to childlike and innocent aesthetics and percepts like cuteness.
Conclusion
The gendering of cuteness, as well as its association with children and innocence, has been a discussion filled with controversy. Some have cited cuteness as an aesthetic that adult women subscribe to as being a harmful pedophilic tendency of society, where men are attracted to young girls more than they are attracted to women of the same age. Others have retorted with the fact that aesthetics are primarily for the self before anyone else; there are healing aspects of aesthetics and cuteness that make people gravitate towards them in a way that they don’t with other types of visuals. The feelings of wholesomeness elicited by cuteness are something that many people deem attractive about the aesthetic. Thus, cuteness has become a popular visual for people to adopt, both in their person as well as in their surroundings.
Works Cited
Bow, L. & The American Studies Association. (2019). Racist cute: Caricature, Kawaii-Style, and the Asian thing. American Quarterly, 71, 1. https://english.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/179/2017/09/1.-american-quarterly-19.pdf
Clark, Kenneth and Mamie. “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children.” The Journal of Negro Education. 19:3 (1950): 341-350. Web. 10 February 2010
Gray, G. P. (2022). Japanese gender norms and their impact on male attitudes toward women. In Emerald Publishing Limited eBooks (pp. 143–159). https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-127-420221012
Kringelback, M. (2016). How cute things hijack our brains and drive behaviour.
Livingston, Robert W. and Nicholas A. Pearce. “The Teddy-Bear Effect: Does Having a Baby face Benefit Black Chief Executive Officers?” Psychological Science. 20:10 (2009): 1229-1236. Web. 27 April 2010.
Pace, R. (2024, January 2). What does it mean when a guy says you’re beautiful, cute or sexy. Marriage Advice - Expert Marriage Tips & Advice. https://www.marriage.com/advice/relationship/when-he-calls-you-cute-sexy-or-beautiful/
Mcintyre, Anthony. (2020). Gendering Cuteness. 10.1002/9781119429128.
Miller, L. (2006). Beauty up: exploring contemporary Japanese body aesthetics. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/beautyupexplorin00mill_0/page/n7/mode/2up
Queertopia. (2020, March 2). Cuteness, infantilism, and failure in queer aesthetics. QUEERTOPIA. https://www.queertopia.community/post/queer-cuteness-and-failure
Wells Keller, C. (2020). The Cute-Feminine Stereotype: A Social Role Theory Explanation of Sex Differences in Cute Consumption [PhD dissertation]. Northwestern University.
