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This makes me want to talk about "cuteness" for a second. (Riffing off of Sianne Ngai's work--good summary of her book here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-zany-the-cute-and-the-interesting-on-ngais-our-aesthetic-categories/) I think the unsettling and contradictory thing about cuteness as a marketing tool is that, as Ngai says,…
This makes me want to talk about "cuteness" for a second. (Riffing off of Sianne Ngai's work--good summary of her book here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-zany-the-cute-and-the-interesting-on-ngais-our-aesthetic-categories/) I think the unsettling and contradictory thing about cuteness as a marketing tool is that, as Ngai says, cuteness is an aestheticization of powerlessness, so it's made to be disarming or innocent. Which doesn't square well with the fact that a hyper-aestheticized entity like these influencer twins is also attempting to sell us, well, something, whether that's a purchasable commodity or, as AHP writes, an ideology and set of received aspirational narratives that go along with that ideology--not that they'd say that's what they're selling; I mean, they, like us, are consumers of that ideology at the same time that they're producers of it. All of this makes the whole thing at once mercenary and helpless along multiple lines, which is what makes it both effective and disturbing.
Also, though, dovetails beautifully with gender norms around owning/running a business (I recommend Meg Conley's recent essay on the Beanie Baby market for a much more insightful version of this point). The cuteness is kind of what allows them to effectively sell anything, because it renders them perceptually powerless. So there's no threat and it declaws the capitalist underpinnings.
Yeah, really excellent point. Makes me think in general about the gendering of capitalist enterprise as a form of obfuscation, like how MLMs are frequently articulated as being about care or wellness or other female-coded transcendent values.
Those girls can sell anything.
Can you link to the article? It sounds fascinating!
https://megconley.substack.com/p/the-beanie-baby-boom-the-influencer
Oh, this is fascinating. Thank you for sharing it! I think there's an some kind of an extension of this in 'hating on things that teen girls like'. I can't quite articulate it, but there's an intersecting track some place -- have you seen Lindsey Ellis' video essay apologizing to Stephanie Meyer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O06tMbIKh0
This is exactly what I was getting at, but written out better than I could have! (Also want to read her book, have it on my shelf and excited to pick it up soon!) I think it's that under capitalism, they're bound by the very thing they're using to market themselves and supposedly benefitting from, even though ultimately "cuteness" ultimately shrinks/neutralizes their power.
I mean, it's strange how cuteness is so frequently accompanied by feelings of it being fake, or even "icky," right? Someone should write about "icky" as an aesthetic category. It's not the horror show of abjection that "disgusting" is; it's the "cute" version of disgusting.
What you say about "bound by the very thing they're using to market themselves" reminds me that in the last week, when attempting to find a sample scholarly article that I could use with students in a library instruction session, I came across and decided to use one on selfies that articulates them as a form of "conspicuous prosumption" (production + consumption in a single act). Still trying to wrap my head around the layers of prosumption that influencers are engaging in--what they're producing, what they're consuming, all in the singular act of posting.