The last time the Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum hosted a session on cuteness was in 2007, many years before cute mania fully expanded into the phenomenon it is today. Since that time, the Japanese word kawaii, which loosely translates to “cute,” has entered the global vernacular, and cuteness has become a widespread aesthetic shaping children’s literature, media, and culture around the world. Simultaneously, cute studies has emerged as a vibrant academic subfield drawing from the groundbreaking work of Sianne Ngai, Christine Yano, and other scholars.
Our forum is sponsoring this session to mark the developments in cute studies that have occurred over the past 20 years. The session brings children’s literature scholars together with scholars currently at the forefront of cute studies, including Joshua Paul Dale (author of Irresistible) and Leslie Bow (author of Racist Love), to explore this global cultural phenomenon. The panel also features diverse scholars from different institutional contexts and at various career stages.
To leave ample time for discussion, each of the four panelists will present for 12 minutes followed by a Q&A of approximately 25 minutes.
The session begins with Joshua Paul Dale’s paper, which considers the work of the Scottish artist Rachel Maclean. Maclean is deeply influenced by children’s literature and culture, from fairy tales and Disney to toys, dolls, and Victorian faerie folklore. Scholars usually consider cuteness in Maclean’s work as a symptom of infantilized adults and commercialized children, a “horror” produced by late capitalist consumerism. However, Dale argues that Maclean’s use of cuteness is broader and more nuanced. In her work, the cute interrogates the adult-child binary by creating a playful atmosphere of innocence and nostalgia that turns sinister to offer unsettling reflections on power, gender, identity, and technology, from social media addiction to AI.
Sayanti Mondal’s paper theorizes the lure of Labubus through the lens of affective capitalism. Labubus, a line of collectible plush toys created by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung and based on his Nordic fairy-tale inspired picture book The Monsters, became a viral sensation in 2025. Mondal explores how the attractiveness of these toys has been enhanced by the ugly-cute aesthetic along with the emotional value added by blind box marketing and the ritualization of restock events. Mondal argues that Labubu’s hype culture is not just about cultural consumption, but also about cultural production in the neoliberal economy, where affect, desire, and embodied practices are commodified to transform personal experiences into capital that yields profit.
Next, Erica Kanesaka’s paper examines the reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in the global lolita fashion subculture. Lolita is a cute, demure, and hyperfeminine style of dress from Japan that reinterprets Victorian and Rococo fashions through a kawaii lens. While rejecting any relationship to the novel of the same name, the lolita community has been forced to contend with its problematic proximity to the fetishization of girlhood, particularly for Asian girls and women. Kanesaka responds by reading the fashion’s uptake of Alice as an ironic overturning, not just of heteropatriarchy, but of Orientalism. This paper argues that Alice functions in the subculture as a flexible figure for performing kawaii as a subversive act—a figure now complicated by her global recirculation among racially diverse communities.
The session concludes with Leslie Bow’s paper, which explores the affects surrounding beauty, cuteness, and desire within U.S. fandom of East Asian idol culture. The Japanese bishonen or beautiful boy and his South Korean counterpart, the kkhonminam or flower boy, inaugurated the soft masculinity now visualized in comics, anime, gaming, drama, and pop idol culture. Exploring a complex spectatorship that imagines the bishonen as simultaneously son and husband, boy and man, child and adult, Bow suggests that straight female fandom speaks to the contradictions within cuteness itself as an aesthetic reflecting both domination and care. Engaging the split desires underlying infantilized yet sexualized Asianized masculinity, this paper analyzes how the cute emerges as an aesthetic form that speaks to fantasies of intimacy and collapsed distance underlying parasocial relationships gone global.