Description
The world of international politics has been variously depicted as militarised, securitised, traumatic, euphoric, magical, practical, gruesome, sublime, and gravely serious. This paper contends that international politics in the digital age is also increasingly mediated and consumed through a more diminutive aesthetics of ‘cuteness’. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s work on cuteness as an aesthetics of hyper-mediated powerlessness (2012), this paper examines what it means to be cute or think about cuteness in the international register. How does cuteness as an aesthetic mode mobilise in international spaces and imaginaries? What work do the emotions and discourses generated through cuteness do in world politics and what relations of power(lessness) emerge through the mediated proliferation of cute subjectivities? Navigating examples from pandemic-era feel-good news accounts on social media offering ‘no politics, just good news’, to photos of diminutive, doe-eyed IDF soldiers accusing critics of ‘being mean’, we demonstrate how cuteness seeps into and mediates everyday political life, and shapes what we see as political. We argue that cuteness functions as a mediated method for smoothing the rough edges of world politics, simultaneously rendering the scary and strange as soft, domestic, and familiar, and exoticising and commoditising the comfortable and well-known. In doing so, we bring International Relations into conversation with the field of cute studies and pay closer attention to an aesthetic mode that has largely gone under IR’s radar, but which nonetheless has increasingly powerful effects on how we make sense of global politics.
