Puppets, Gods, and Brands

“Let’s Go, Baby Forklift!”: Fandom Governance and the Political Power of Cuteness in China

“…arising from their re-creation in numerous media and styles by hundreds, thousands of fans" (p. 428). Given the power of this framework for mobilizing emotional investment, Silvio argues, it has spread from the realm of entertainment; now corporations, nations, and even religious movements seek to brand themselves with cute mascots capable of inspiring devoted followings (Silvio, 2019). We build upon Silvio's insights, showing how the co-created animation of the construction vehicle idols draws upon the cultural logic of fandom.…”

“…Moreover, as all these authors show, because of their open-ended meanings and almost infinite resignifiability, the same memes can be used for different purposes, political or otherwise. Drawing on fandom's register of verbal, visual, semiotic, and interactional practices, internet users "animated" (Silvio, 2010(Silvio, , 2019 the construction vehicles from hospital construction livestreams, rendered them cute, and engaged with them in small but significant acts of symbolic devotion. By playfully embellishing an otherwise straightforward propagandistic spectacle, remote supervisors produced memetic content that Chinese state social media could itself appropriate and channel into a fandom apparatus it adapted from the entertainment industry.…”

“…Nevertheless, in the events we analyze, cuteness emerges as a dominant motif in Chinese citizens' engagements with the state, and in the state's engagement with citizens. We argue that cuteness, in conveying qualities of dependency and diminutiveness, can constitute a counterintuitive form of power: the power to inspire affection and to engender play (Abidin, 2016;Hiramoto & Wee, 2019;Silvio, 2019). In tracing how Chinese internet publics and state-run social media accounts interactively mobilized signs of cuteness during a national crisis, we offer an account of both the power of cuteness and the cuteness of power in contemporary Chinese society.…”

Seeing (or perceiving) difference in multiracial Singapore: Habits of looking in a raciolinguistic image economy

“…The light‐colored “Other” dressed in Western clothing is also most likely intended to depict a Eurasian Singaporean, the mixed‐race descendants of European and Asian intermarriages (Pereira, 2006), not a foreigner, even though the “O” of CMIO itself encompasses a broad range of others from across both ethno‐racialized and citizenship groups. Like other cartoons, it does not aspire to aesthetic realism per se, but through its simplification serves as a projective ground and interface for animating hegemonic images (Silvio, 2019, especially chapters 1 and 3)—here, the “races of Singapore.” This includes the fair‐skinned “Other,” itself a simplification: needless to say, the standardized image of Eurasian Singaporeans as fair‐skinned, “ambiguous” (but still decidedly “Asian”‐looking) subjects does not encompass the Eurasian raciolinguistic community, let alone the spectrum of official and unofficial “Others.”…”

Tropological Thought and Action

“…I am thinking about how I used to imagine anonymous blog commenting as the most Cré na Cillish medium yet. But we are in the Age of Animation now (Silvio 2019), and the age of mass extinction, and most living humans are natives of a world where Ó Cadhain's "dráma doilfeach" has a new type of materiality, and "our environment is in a state of constant mutability and flux, and . .…”