In the context of cute material culture, this article focuses on the production of valorized cute aesthetic in fashion clothes being sold on Chinese social media. Through corpus-enlightened empirical case studies, the article demonstrates how the baby-talk register converges with the material design and embodiment of clothes to synergically affect the cute materiality of the clothes at issue. With special attention paid to discursive practices of enregisterment, the study tries to recalibrate the existing biased hermeneutics of cute material culture that largely reduce cute clothes to material immediacy and consumerist passivity. The study sheds light on the collegiality and complementarity that enregisterment shows for embodiment and material design in the production of material aesthetics, and by doing so enriches the understanding of materiality within clothing material culture in general.
AbidinC (2016) Agentic cute (^.^): Pastiching East Asian cute in influencer commerce. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture2(1): 33–47.
2.
AghaA (1999) Register. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology9(1/2): 216–219.
3.
AghaA (2004) Registers of language. In: DurantiA (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell, 23–45.
4.
AghaA (2005) Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology15(1): 38–59.
5.
AghaA (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6.
AllisonA (2004) Cuteness as Japan’s millennial product. In: TobinJ (ed.) Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 34–49.
BlommaertJVarisP (2015) Culture as accent: The cultural logic of hijabistas. Semiotica2015(203): 153–177.
15.
BucholtzM (2009) From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In: JaffeA (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 203–223.
16.
ButlerJ (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Taylor & Francis.
17.
ButlerJ (2010) Performative agency. Journal of Cultural Economy3(2): 147–161.
18.
CarollT (2017) Im/material objects: Relics, gestured signs, and the substance of the immaterial. In: HutchingsTMcKenzieJ (eds) Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred. New York: Routledge, 119–132.
19.
ChaoS (2017) Cosplay, cuteness and weiniang: The queered ke’ai of male cosplayers as ‘fake girls’. In: LavinM (ed.) Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 20–44.
20.
EicherJB (2006) Clothing as material culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute12(2): 484–485.
21.
ErbaughM (1982) Coming to order: Natural selection and the origin of syntax in the Mandarin speaking child. PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley.
22.
FergusonCA (1964) Baby talk in six languages. American Anthropologist66(6): 103–l14.
23.
GillRPrattA (2008) In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. Theory, Culture & Society25(7/8): 1–30.
24.
GoffmanE (1978) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Harmondsworth.
25.
GranotEAlejandroTBRussellLTM (2013) A socio-marketing analysis of the concept of cute and its consumer culture implications. Journal of Consumer Culture14(1): 66–87.
26.
HansenKT (2004) The world in dress: Anthropological perspectives on clothing, fashion, and culture. Annual Review of Anthropology33: 369–392.
27.
KatsunoHYanoC (2007) Kaomoji and expressivity in a Japanese housewives’ chat room. In: DanetBHerringSC (eds) The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 279–300.
28.
KeaneW (2005) Signs are not the garb of meaning: On the social analysis of material things. In: MillerD (ed.) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 182–205.
29.
KinsellaS (1995) Cuties in Japan. In: SkovLMoeranB (eds) Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 220–254.
30.
KressGVan Leeuwen (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
31.
KüchlerSMillerD (eds) (2005) Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg.
32.
LakoffR (1973) Language and woman’s place. Language in Society2(1): 45–80.
33.
LakoffR (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
34.
LorenzK (1971) Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Vol. 2, trans. MartinR. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
35.
MadgeL (1997) Capitalizing on ‘cuteness’: The aesthetics of social relations in a new postwar Japanese order. Japanstudien9(1): 155–174.
36.
MarcusA, et al. (2017) Cuteness in China. In: Cuteness Engineering: Designing Adorable Products and Services. Cham: Springer, 63–92.
37.
McVeighB (1996) Commodifying affection, authority and gender in the everyday objects of Japan. Journal of Material Culture1(3): 291–312.
38.
McVeighB (2000) How Hello Kitty commodifies the cute, cool and camp: ‘Consumutopia’ versus ‘control’ in Japan. Journal of Material Culture5(2): 225–245.
39.
MillerL (2004) You are doing burikko! Censoring/scrutinizing artificers of cute femininity in Japanese. In: OkamotoSSmithJSS (eds) Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 148–165.
40.
MillerD (2005a) Materiality: An introduction. In: MillerD (ed.) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–50.
41.
MillerD (2005b) Introduction. In: KüchlerSMillerD (eds) Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg.
42.
OhkuraMKomatsuTAotoT (2014) Kawaii rules: Increasing affective value of industrial products. In: WatadaJ, et al. (eds) Industrial Applications of Affective Engineering. Cham: Springer, 97–110.
43.
PeirceCS (1932) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. II: Elements of Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
44.
RitzerGJurgensonN (2010) Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture10: 13–36.
YanoCR (2011) Reach out and touch someone: Thinking through Sanrio’s social communication empire. Japanese Studies31(1): 23–36.
56.
YomotaI (2006) ‘Kawaii’ ron (Theory of ‘Kawaii’). Tokyo: Tikuma Sinsyo.
57.
YuHCuiL (2019) China’s e-commerce: Empowering rural women?The China Quarterly2019(238): 418–437.
58.
ZhangL (2018) The contradictions of “women’s work” in digital capitalism: A “non-Western”/Chinese perspective. Feminist Media Studies18(1): 147–151.
59.
ZitongQ (2013) Cuteness as a subtle strategy: Urban female youth and the online feizhuliu culture in contemporary China. Cultural Studies27(2): 225–241.
