Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak, which is why cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there’s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as people like Daniel Harris have noted. The prototypically cute object is the child’s toy or stuffed animal. (..) Like the sentimental, which as literary critic Jennifer Fleissner points out, we wouldn’t call “sentimental” if it really moved us deeply in the way that it aims to, the cute seems coupled with a certain inability to complete its own project.
(..)
In comparison to powerful experiences like that of the sublime or disgusting, these aesthetic experiences are profoundly equivocal; indeed, they almost seem to call attention to their relative lack of aesthetic impact or power, to their own aesthetic ineffectuality. But that doesn’t finally negate their status as aesthetic categories.

//Sianne Ngai