Cuteness is a research project and publication developed in collaboration with Engy El-Shenawy. It exists simultaneously as a printed manual in progress and as an expanding, interactive digital archive. The project investigates cuteness not as a harmless aesthetic, but as a cultural device loaded with power, projection, and violence.

The archive is built through deliberate appropriation: screenshots, downloads, copy-paste, theft without hierarchy. Mainstream media images sit next to memes, kittens, pornography, selfies, manga, kawaii and hentai culture, advertising, stock imagery, and fragments of theory. No distinction is made between “serious” and “trivial” sources. This messiness is structural. Cuteness works precisely because it appears innocent while operating across gender, sexuality, childhood, and consumption.

Drawing on embodied cognition and extended mind theory, the project treats visual culture as something that actively shapes subjectivity rather than merely reflecting it. Following Foucault and Butler, cuteness is read as a system that produces cultural subjects. It infantilizes, feminizes, pacifies. Joshua Paul Dale and the authors of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness describe cuteness as an affective register built on asymmetry: domination and tenderness, care and control, attraction and aggression. The cute object invites protection while stripping agency.

Mike Kelley’s work is another key reference here. In We Communicate Only Through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic, Kelley exposes how adults project trauma, pathology, and abuse onto children’s drawings through pseudo-clinical language, demonstrating the violence is in the adult interpretation of the child’s marks. This same mechanism operates in cuteness: the child, the animal, the feminized body become screens for adult anxiety, desire, and fear. Kelley’s stuffed animals, repeatedly read as symbols of abuse, reveal a cultural obsession that confuses care with domination and innocence with submission.

Cuteness is deeply entangled with the market. It increases saleability, but more importantly it trains passivity. Infantilization becomes a consumer strategy. Kittens, kawaii mascots, feminized avatars, even military hardware decorated with cute characters, all soften power while making it more pervasive.

This project does not aim to define cuteness once and for all. It treats it as a superobject: unstable, contradictory, emotionally sticky. An archive of tenderness, control, desire, and discomfort.