Aaron Oldenburg
@aaronoldenburg.bsky.social
63 followers
560 following
15 posts
artist, game designer, living in Baltimore
He/him
https://aaronoldenburg.net
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![Freaks And (Child) Prodigies: Historicising Cuteness […] As a strategy for managing the radical Otherness of the child, cuteness is […] intimately bound up with the history of the ‘freak’. There are obvious parallels between child and freak: both are liminal figures, residing on the boundaries that separate the ‘fully human’ from the ‘less-than-human’. 4 That ‘cute’ child and ‘freak’ are reciprocally defined is supremely evident in the film E.T., which constructs an identification between child and freak (only the children can communicate with E.T.) in order to position the freakish extraterrestrial as a (cute) monster to be adopted. The monstrosity of the ‘alien’ E.T. does not diminish but rather intensifies his cuteness – in part because his desire for ‘home’ (as well as his docility) renders him sentimentally recuperable, available to assimilation within normative domestic and affectional structures.
From Lori Mersh's Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics, in the Whitechapel contemporary art theory survey, The Cute](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:axlyt5mwbeyzgo3n7om7nzxe/bafkreiew3e7jwwx32uzjjr4opswuuzyvt4urcykrmlciqglwwxipglufhi@jpeg)
Reposted by Aaron Oldenburg
Asha Rangappa
@asharangappa.bsky.social
· Aug 14
Reposted by Aaron Oldenburg
