Short Abstract

This panel talks about the changing and often political and gently subversive use of cute (kawaii, meng, kei’ai) aesthetics and symbols and cute and sexy (animation/games) idol and character culture, which has emerged at a grassroots and regionally interconnected level in contemporary East Asia.

Long Abstract

Rather than focusing on national cultural ontologies or so-called ‘fundamental’ psychological mechanisms of kawaii, meng, and kei’ai, the contemporary historical situation in which evolutions of kawaii have emerged as the core aesthetic mode and symbolic matrix of the digital social and visual world, and through this embedded in political and gender-based resistance and communication, will be explored. Case studies looking at the renewed and diverse use of kawaii /meng / kei’ai in male subcultures and idol groups: in China and Japan; in lesbian-aligned K-Pop fan worlds in South Korea; through cute and critical memes in China; and in emerging cute and non-conformist social relationships and practices in Asian digital social media space. The cute aesthetic and posture frame both quietly subversive and explicitly resistant political meme culture across East Asia and connect regional resistances of digital native generations to the limitations and frustrations of psychological, social and economic life within enforced but exhausted mass heterosexual postwar socio-economic systems.

This panel is a meeting and open discussion between 4 researchers at different stages of their career, carrying out ethnography and cultural analysis within China, Korea, and Japan and in those languages. The goal of this panel is to deepen collaborative and conjoined work across North East Asian area studies, in order to build a linked focus and analysis of the increasingly regional politics and symbolism in digital visual culture and online social life. That is to say that this panel seeks to meet the transnational symbolic cultural language and digital grassroots social sphere of East Asia using an appropriately trans-Asian and multi-language analysis. The panel is linked to a forthcoming edited book on Cute and Politics in Asian Visual and Digital Culture, progressing from panel and conference discussion.