The interesting thing about cuteness, which Sianne Ngai examines in this reading of the “cute eroticism” of Stein’s Tender Buttons, is that it seems to produce a “deverbalizing effect” on the reader. Babies and puppies are infantilizing; they make us oo and ah, coo, murmer and babble back. Ngai considers that Gertrude Stein’s cutesy (virtuosic) language play may have caused her critics at the time to slide into babble and imitation in place of argument when discussing her work. I find compelling her idea that cuteness seems to both provoke and mask violence: not only that implied in the word itself etymologically, as “cute” comes from the sharp “acute,” but also a violence that seems part of the inevitable aggression that cuteness provokes in the viewer. There are aspects of this essay that do not sit well with me, and I think I am slowly formulating a critique in my head about Ngai’s reliance on a particular lineage of “avant-gardes” in her analyses, as well as her refusal to address the ways art and culture have served to justify and to a certain extent mask the extent to which the society she discusses is dependent on a colonizing structure in terms of land, labor and natural resources. I have not spent time to parse this out yet.