Share this comment
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.
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.