Browsing by Author "Saarela, Minna"

This thesis aims to contribute more understanding of cuteness as a phenomenon related to power relations. Objective was also to further engage in discussion about the meanings of cuteness. The subject is relevant in early childhood education field, where cuteness is present both in the relations between adults and children, and with visual and material cultural products. The study takes a multidisciplinary perspective and addresses cuteness as a material, affective, semiotic, and cultural phenomenon. Theoretical frame of reference contains different and even contradictory perspectives on cuteness. Due to its affective potential cuteness can be interpreted as a motivation for nurturing behavior and an appeal to sociality. Anthropomorphic cuteness has humanizing charisma. Cuteness can be used both to frame objects with lovability and to objectify them as weak, but it also has ambivalent indeterminacy. This empiric study emphasizes theory as a part of abductive and interpretivist research. Taking a post-structural and feministic orientation, the study applies a discursive-deconstructive reading as analysis method (see Brunila & Ikävalko, 2012). The analysis aimed to locate binary hierarchies and to identify how cuteness works in these contexts. The perspectives on cuteness gathered in the framework were used as interpretive lenses in the analysis. The multimodal research material was assembled as a discretionary sample. It consists of two mutually different product of children´s culture, which are Molang -animation episode The Party (2015, Millimages) and Tatu ja Patu – Kovaa menoa kiskoilla (2020, Havukainen, A. & Toivonen, S., Otava). The power-related dimensions of cuteness were located in material-discursive practices which concern childhood and adulthood, emotion and reason, strange and normal, female and male, feminine and masculine, lovable and disgusting, animal and human, and immoral and moral actor. It is stated that cuteness has potential both for the use of power that objectifies the other and for resisting it. The results show how cuteness is connected to different contexts taking part in power relations. The results are considered to have value in the context of education. In discussion cuteness is considered as a contradictory phenomenon in its meaning that requires questioning of habitual thought patterns and ethical reflection. The possibilities of posthumanist and postqualitative research, the relationships between cuteness and humor, and the inexhaustible field of cute consumer culture are mentioned as topics for further research.