Cute Surveillance: Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Intimacy in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes

Abstract

In recent years, a range of commercial home surveillance products have emerged that foreground ‘cuteness’ as a selling point. From small cat-shaped cameras with detachable ears to ‘pocket robots’ equipped with speech recognition, movable feet, and interactive LED eyes, these devices imbue digital surveillance with social categories designed to appeal to a consumer’s affective desires and vulnerabilities. In this article, I read cultural criticism alongside literary fiction to theorize ‘cute surveillance’ as an emergent form of commercially marketed voyeurism. The article takes up Sianne Ngai’s concept of cute as a ‘soft’ aesthetic category alongside the anthropomorphising of domestic surveillance in Samanta Schweblin’s novel Little Eyes (2020). Reading Ngai and Schweblin together, I argue that cuteness is an unstable yet lucrative social construct that is increasingly exploited by the capitalist logics of present-day multi-platform surveillance products. Focusing on Little Eyes, I show how the personal and societal implications of cute surveillance are imagined and represented in the contemporary speculative novel, which stages intersubjective relations between characters who watch each other remotely via ‘smart home’ devices. Across the three interrelated dynamics of embodiment, subjectivity, and intimacy, I offer a theoretical framework for articulating the problems that arise when surveillance becomes interpellated—and insidiously disguised—through visual aesthetics. Show more