Abstract
Senegalese-French filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré's resistance project, Cuties (2020), aimed to alert adults about the dangers of hypersexualization on social media and its harm to young girls. However, the film content and its suggestive Netflix marketing campaign led to it being misinterpreted and maligned as “child pornography.” This study examines these controversies, arguing that the heightened gaze stems from “othering” Black girlhood and polarizing views circulating in the digital space. We contend these occurrences, evident in our selected data sources, speak to a larger phenomenon wherein human and nonhuman actors across various media channels and news cultures worked to quiet historically marginalized voices. Furthermore, the movie's controversy allows for a critique of the media ecosystem and its role in a market-driven economy.
Keywords
The French term mise en scène refers to the deliberate choices made by directors and production teams, looking to convey specific meanings or evoke certain emotions, aesthetics, and scenes. Director Maïmouna Doucouré (2020a) attempts such with her resistance project, Cuties. Her thought-provoking piece aims to illuminate the experiences of Aminata (Amy), a young Senegalese girl from a conservative Muslim background, who grapples with finding her identity between hypersexualized and highly mediated Western worlds. Within these interlocking spheres of influence, the presentation of Amy's female body within a storyline appears at the center of the struggle.
Two scenes illustrate her conflicts. One features 11-year-old Amy yearning to fit in with The Cuties clique by auditioning with them for a local dance contest (Doucouré, 2020a, 51:30–54:47). It overlaps with the same day she prepares with her elder aunt for her father's upcoming polygamous marriage. Amy decides to cut away from her apartment, puts on a crop top to join the group, only to find the door locked and unable to participate in the routine. The subsequent scene includes a wide-angle shot of a defeated Amy standing in the entryway of her family's apartment after her classmates bullied her for not showing up. A look of frustration and innocence appears on her chocolate brown, round face. Her Senegalese elder chastises her for her recent behavior. This atmosphere takes an unexpected turn when we hear the condescending-like laughter of the elder lady; Amy casts her eyes downward, bewildered at the stain in the crevice of her pants.
In another scene, the elder aunt and her mother express their disdain with Amy's defiant behavior at school and at home. They proceed to cleanse her with water in a ceremonial act. Amy appears in a tank top and her underwear, with eyes closed, as the “rebelliousness” evaporates from her being. Chanting-like music and dim lighting capture the sacred moment, as Amy falls limp to the floor (Doucouré, 2020a, 1:10:44–1:12:25).
Both vignettes frame the story of a young, Black girl managing identities and ideologies—Western and non-Western; girlhood and womanhood; and patriarchal and matriarchal. And yet, these narrative nuances remain eclipsed by the controversy sparked by Netflix's (2020) promotional advertisement for the film's American debut; the scenes of The Cuties twerking; and the misinterpretation of the spiritual cleansing of Amy by her mother and aunt. Hashtags such as #CancelNetflix trend on X, formerly Twitter, and Internet Movie Database (IMDb) users write comments of disgust on the movie database's platform.
Conservative politicians such as U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Texas State Republican Representative Matt Schaefer of the 6th District demand pornography laws be examined by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Texas state judicial system, respectively. A Texas grand jury did indict Netflix for “promotion of lewd visual material depicting child,” which was filed on October 6, 2020, in Tyler County, Texas (Bahr, 2020; Drezner, 2020; Madani, 2020); and on December 18, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a lower court's decision, saying that Cuties did not represent pornography. Overall, the moral panic expressed by audiences after the U.S. release suggests interpretations were influenced by the media's coverage of the controversy and the conservative politicians’ voices leading the charge.
We aim to look at the impact of conservative politicians and nonhuman actors’ disdain for Cuties in the digital space to understand the continued hypersexualization of Black girls and women in contemporary society. We consider this to be important because this complex component of the conservative news culture (Bauer & Nadler, 2019) supplants intersectional resistance knowledge projects by Black women of the African diaspora. Furthermore, we suggest the phenomenon illuminates how both digital and print press create “grey spaces” (Halliday, 2020; Morgan, 2019), where nuances and subtexts (Crenshaw, 1991) about Black girls’ and women's bodies and agency cannot be imagined beyond the gaze of erotica and sexual deviancy. As screenwriter and critic Haaniyah Angus (2020) suggests, “can we both unpack what it means to be a young girl in the 21st century and discourage imagery seen in Cuties?” (para. 21).
To conduct our analysis, we employed a multimodal critical discourse analysis. We examined the film's marketing campaign, and a purposive sample of The Washington Post articles from 2020, featuring the conservatives’ allegations about the film. In addition, we analyzed legislators’ letters to the U.S. Department of Justice and Netflix executives, and a United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision. Lastly, we reviewed IMDb's parents’ guide and review section. The question guiding our analysis explored how do specific mediated spaces such as the U.S. public sphere affect the examination of black girlhood and its hypersexualization?
Our argument centers on the market-driven attention economy shaping the digital era. Narratives employed by conservative politicians, the press, and the audiences/users appear to mirror the polarized politics phenomenon, where underlying long-standing conflicts speak to media and politicians’ economic and political interests. We contend the current media landscape lacks a critical examination of the impact and consequences of the messages being transmitted. And Netflix, as a significant streaming service of our contemporary society and known for its “everydayness” in people's lives, makes it an enticing point of departure to launch this multilayered interrogation (Ortega, 2023, p. 127).
Cuties Plot Summary
Mignonnes or Cuties in English (Doucouré, 2020a) is a coming-of-age story about Amy (short for Aminata), an 11-year-old Senegalese-French, Muslim girl living in public housing in the suburbs of Paris, France, with her mother and two younger brothers. She encounters a popular group of three preteen girls at school, called The Cuties, who perform mannequin challenges and dance routines in their free time based on suggestive postings modeled from social media. The movie follows Amy's efforts to balance culture and class structures of France.
Literature Review
Mediated Interlocking Oppressions
The historical trajectory of Black women and girls being pathologized in media remains vast and extends beyond the scope of the paper. However, we want to highlight interlocking critical moments relevant to this case. The first explores colonial and migratory patterns and representations of Blackness and race during these demographic shifts. In the United States, the movement of rural Black people to Northern cities during the Great Migration ignited a moral panic (Carby, 1992; Wilkerson, 2010). Racism and sexism limited work opportunities and women took menial jobs, engaged in illegal activities, or joined vaudeville dance troupes (Carby, 1992). Characterizations of Black migrants as deviant were cast by Whites and middle-class Blacks, a belief system shaped by European colonial history and bourgeoise and plantation culture (Frazier, 1957; Mbembe, 2017).
On a transnational level, people of the African diaspora encountered the effects of European colonialism. Stories of displacement, violence, and struggle existed as well as accounts of resistance and emancipation (Patterson & Kelley, 2000). The Haitian uprising represented such an example, where the enslaved fought for 12 years the Spanish's, English's and then the French's occupation to obtain their freedom in 1803 (James, 1963). The French did not recover from this slight and its citizens in power waged a propaganda campaign of othering, particularly of Black women (Mitchell, 2020). Examples were the hypersexualization of Ourika, a Senegalese woman in the 18th century (Mitchell, 2020), and of Saartjie (Sarah/Sara) Baartman or “Hottentot Venus,” a Khosian woman in the 19th century (Gordon-Chipembere, 2011; Sharpley-Whiting, 1999).
The second addresses the development of film, literature, art, and media and their representations or lack thereof of Blackness and race. Black diasporic feminist scholars and cultural critics explain the ways in which settler colonialism shaped status quo and Western views of Blackness as deficient (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994/2008). Collins (2000) examined negative views of Black women's bodies and behaviors in the United States context, often characterized as sapphires, jezebels, and mammies. The tropes of “other” privileged White womanhood as pure and Black women as sexually degenerative (Carby, 1992; Said, 1979).
Scholar Laura Mulvey (1992/2012) employed a psychoanalytic lens to unpack the way film captivates and mesmerizes. The theoretical underpinning assisted in “demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (Mulvey, 1992/2012, p. 267) and exploring visual pleasure as spectacle. When the passive female form enters the frame, Mulvey (1992/2012) argued it disrupted the narrative and storyline because of “erotic contemplation” on behalf of the spectator (p. 270). Hobson (2002) explained, though, how Mulvey's (1992/2012) theoretical lens does not account for “racial factors and how they might shape ‘looking relations’ in cinema” (p. 46). Furthermore, Plantinga (2009) argued effect, along with experience, can impact how the interpreter views and interacts with a film. The genre deserves more attention and how viewing expectations can be influenced by various factors.
The third accounts for contemporary moments where media and law intersect with race and gender. Crenshaw (1991) and Collins (2000) addressed both in their analyses on the appropriateness and politicization of lyrics and criticism through the law. Collins (2000) addressed the misogyny in 2 Live Crews’ song, “Hoochie Mama,” but acknowledged the language and misrepresentation of Black women remained protected by First Amendment law. Crenshaw (1991) analyzed the controversy and lawsuit in 1990 against 2 Live Crew in Florida, where their lyrics and performances were deemed as lewd. Conflicting interpretations featured political commentator George Will describing the rap groups’ lyrics as objectifying Black women, whereas scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., countered by saying the song's lyrics in question represented a kind of “signifying” and double entendre characteristic of African American English (Crenshaw, 1991). While the lyrics were distasteful, Crenshaw (1991) wondered about the intention of Will's and other White males’ critique of 2 Live Crew's content protected under First Amendment law. Did they really care about the depictions of the Black women in the lyrics? Or were they concerned about surveilling Black bodies?
Collins (2004) argued in Black Sexual Politics that sexuality may be “manipulated within each distinctive system of race, class, and gender oppression” and supported by economic or cultural hegemonic agendas (p. 11). Sharpley-Whiting (1999) delved into the psyche of the 19th century French male gaze in the literature and film, arguing the Black woman's body represented a “primal fear” and “desire” and conjured up “repulsion, attraction, and anxiety” (p. 6). Black girls have received similar scrutiny being studied for “adultification” and “hypersexualization” (Field & Simmons, 2022; Halliday, 2020, p. 880). But Aria S. Halliday (2020) and Field and Simmons (2022) looked to counter depictions, each arguing transnational perspectives of Black girlhood gleaned from archives and digital platforms present a more emancipatory and celebratory experience. However, representations of Black women or girls as deviant or as the “sexualized savage” align with elite White male interests (Collins, 2000). Any reclaiming of visual and written representations by creators runs counter to patriarchal narratives.
Cultural Capital Expanded
Films represent cultural artifacts, carrying the meaning and the zeitgeist of a given society. At the same time, films constitute a port of entry to grasp the beliefs, values, and practices featured through technology (Susman, 1985). In turn, within this cultural artifact, its appreciation among audiences must be defined in sociological terms as a social practice. The values attributed to cultural products such as films are conferred based on socially constructed qualities ascribed to them, rather than intrinsic qualities of that artifact.
Drawing on Bourdieu's (1973) concept of cultural capital, people develop their relationship with various forms of art through continuous interaction and exposure to the symbols and signs that influence their preferences. Traditionally, the concept explored ways elite classes acquired matters of taste about Western high culture. Education, kinships, and social experiences informed their perspectives. However, contemporary analyses see the concept to be broader. Advances in technology and more access to education have broadened people's exposure to culture and their assessment of it (Prieur & Savage, 2013; Woodward, 2018).
Bourdieu's (1973) analysis of cultural capital developed within a French context and did not clearly translate to American perspectives of social stratification (Lamont & Lareau, 1988). As Lamont and Lareau (1988) suggest the same high culture makers of France may not be as evident or mirror those in the United States. But what does exist are cultural boundaries and divisions shaped by race and American political identity (Pew Research Center, 2021). Struggles between these racial and ideological boundaries may reveal attributes as to what constitutes as high cultural signals of inclusion and exclusion (Lamont & Lareau, 1988; Prieur & Savage, 2013; Woodward, 2018). The boundaries mentioned create a social order; and if disrupted, deviancies may arise (Erickson, 2004). Legitimate, emotional, and moral capital have been identified as new ways people, regardless of social class, exhibit and exert their power (Woodward, 2018). The internet serves as a tool to amplify and demonstrate these positions, with more voices engaged in the public sphere (Fraser, 1990) beyond the bourgeoise class.
Digital Era and Gatekeeping
Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells (2010) contends we currently reside in an Informational Age, where the convergence of the internet and digital technologies has transformed the structure of modern society. This evolution is marked by a rapid and exponential increase in the speed at which ideas travel, shaping productive, political, and cultural systems. Drawing on Castells’ (2010) theory, we argue the immediacy and volume of information circulating within the public sphere have not only transformed our modes of communication but also news consumption. We contend the result of these advancements has deepened the social conflicts about race, gender, and class in the United States, rooted in its early formation of settler colonialism and enslavement. One notable example is the influence of search engines and social media algorithms, which recommend news content to users based on their previous activity and browsing data (Yang & Peng, 2022).
The Digital Era has created a new paradigm for news gathering and gatekeeping. Scholars now examine the marketplace of attention—a dynamic where users’ attention is recognized as a valuable and finite resource within our information-rich society (Goldhaber, 1997). Originally, the gatekeeping theory was devised to illustrate journalists’ monopoly and control over news stories (Shoemaker et al., 2001). However, in the digital era, nonhuman actors such as news aggregators, search engines, and social media bots, have entered the process of distribution and consumption of news. This shift in the media landscape has redefined the dynamics of gatekeeping, expanding the array of actors involved in determining which news content reaches audiences. The algorithms and mechanisms employed by these digital gatekeepers play a significant role in selecting and prioritizing information, exerting profound influence over the visibility and accessibility of news stories.
As Yang and Peng (2022) highlight, the power of digital technologies to manipulate traffic flows among news items reflects their influence in redistributing political power among various actors (p. 995). Moreover, we argue these digital gatekeepers also contribute to reinforcing the echo chamber phenomenon, leading to polarization and exacerbating violent expressions of the long-standing conflict between conservative and progressive groups within the United States. Specifically, we examine how media and politicians’ narratives around Cuties embody ideas and associations appeal to racist and misogynistic conceptions. The effect is detrimental to the Black community, and more broadly, the country.
Methodology
We conducted a multimodal analysis, employing critical discourse and visual analysis to examine diverse texts at the center of the Cuties controversy. This included legal documents, letters, marketing materials, opinion articles, and IMDb parents’ guide and reviews. Our question is how do specific mediated spaces such as the U.S. public sphere affect the examination of black girlhood and its hypersexualization?
The study allowed for an examination of image, writing, color, and layout across the semiotic resources focused on Cuties (Kress, 2010). We explored how each mode of communication can “recontextualize social positions and relations” and appeal to specific audiences (Kress, 2010, p. 139). The use of thick description (Geertz, 1973) and Fairclough's (2015) work on power and discourse guided the analysis of identifying “winks” and “twitches” of culture (Geertz, 1973).
Without conducting semistructured interviews of IMDb reviewers, legislators, Netflix executives, the filmmaker, or Washington Post opinion writers, we remain unaware of intentions. But power does reside within discourse (Fairclough, 2015). Language or certain terminology has a “hidden effect of power” (Fairclough, 2015, p. 83). In the case of our analysis, words such as “child pornography” and “sexualizes” appeared throughout the written text and suggestive images of movie's young girls reinforced the message.
Sample
We compiled a data sample of text from 2020 to 2023, including news releases featuring the conservatives’ allegations about the film; legislators’ official correspondence between U.S. Department of Justice and Netflix executives; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision; opinions on the movie from IMDb's parents’ guide and review section; and the strategic communication and marketing campaign of Cuties during its release in the United States.
To analyze the latter, we compared the French and the United States’ promotional posters that ignited the controversy. We applied critical visual analysis to examine characters’ positions and poses, and clothes to identify tropes of black girlhood, otherhood, and hypersexualization (Kress, 2010). We also examined news releases posted on X, formerly Twitter, and images distributed and repeated in publications. To augment the strategic communications materials, we employed a critical discourse analysis and selected the pieces using The Washington Post archive and Factiva. We chose the newspaper because of the number of stories it featured about the controversy, which included the filmmaker's rebuttal (n = 8).
Regarding the data set (n = 5) of legislator correspondence and legal briefs, we searched the mentioned politicians’ websites and their X feeds, formerly Twitter, and then conducted a keyword search for legal actions taken and statements made related to the film. Lastly, we examined the IMDb parent guide and reviews section to understand how the feedback mechanism corroborated with The Washington Post opinion articles and the legislators’ correspondence.
IMDb's Parent Guide and Review Section
IMDb is an online database that provides information about films, television series, podcasts, and more. It includes details such as cast and production crew biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and both fan and critical reviews (IMDb, 2023). Our analysis focused on (n = 238) reviews of the film Cuties available on its webpage, with and without starred ratings. The goal was to identify the recurring themes among users’ reviews and determine if they overlapped with those found in the other selected data sets. To achieve this, we categorized each review based on their rating of the film and its publication date and eliminated 10 comments with no star ratings for another layer of analysis (n = 228).
By doing a preliminary analysis of review titles and their content, we created 14 categories to analyze the narratives surrounding the film's reception. These categories are detailed in Table 1; however, they were not mutually exclusive because reviews could present multiple narratives at the same time. Thus, they could fall into more than one category. Finally, for some categories, an extra code was added to denote the supportive or opposing attitude toward the narrative.
Categories of narratives on IMDb reviews.
Some methodological caveats must be mentioned. The overall rating of the film is 3.3 stars out of 10 based on 22,000 votes. However, our critical discourse analysis focused on 238 written reviews. We noted users have the option to both rate the movie and write a review or provide a rating. Consequently, only 1.1% of those who rated Cuties also wrote a review. This low percentage could be attributed to individuals voting against the film, which we suggest may have been influenced by the negative attention it garnered from the initial 2020 controversy. Importantly, this low participation rate does not pose a limitation to our analysis; rather, it strengthens our argument about polarization and underscores the impact of media and political influences on shaping public opinion.
Additionally, Figures 1 and 2 show the variation in the rating's distribution among users who wrote a review and those who only provided a rating for the movie. The data suggested ratings given by users who wrote reviews do not align with the distribution of voters. Furthermore, the reviews tended to be more positive, contrasting with the high number of 1-star ratings given by those who only voted.
On IMDb, users can rate a movie from 1 to 10 stars without leaving a review or leave feedback without rating the movie. This analysis examined n = 238 reviews of Cuties, with and without stars, and excluded 10 comments that did not include star ratings, resulting in n = 228 discourses. The graphic considered data from September 10, 2020, when the movie was released, to May 16, 2023, when data collection ended. The majority of IMDb rated-reviews are ten and nine-star ratings, followed by ratings between six and eight stars. One-star reviews account for more than 3.5%.
By May 16, 2023, IMDb documented more than 22,000 global users rating Cuties. One-star ratings account for 69.5% of the votes, while 10-star ratings account for 4.7%. This is in stark contrast to the ratings given by the 228 reviews considered for the analysis.
Results and Discussion
After analyzing the data, three key themes emerged: (1) the mainstream press negotiated between commenting and gazing in their analysis of the movie; (2) the historical legacy of othering and hypersexualizing Black women and girls appeared across discourses; and (3) human and nonhuman actors demonstrated roles characteristic of a conservative news culture.
The Washington Post: Navigating “Grey Spaces”
The Washington Post committed itself to running several opinion pieces about Cuties, which aligned with its focus on covering political stories in the nation's capital. Freelance columnist Sonny Bunch (2020a, 2020b) of The Bulwark contributed two opinion pieces about the film, focusing on the controversy stirred up by online reviewers and politicians such as Cruz. The piece published on September 15, 2020, appeared under the headline, “We're disgusted by what we see in `Cuties'. We're also responsible for it.” In this opinion, Bunch (2020a) focused on the uncomfortable gaze, referring to the disgust he felt while watching the close-up camera shots of the girls' bodies. He assigned words such as icky and squicky—which would be hyperlinked to his second article called “Senators are targeting Hollywood over “Cuties” and China. They should avoid these mistakes” (Bunch, 2020b)—to describe his overall sensation of the film.
Bunch (2020a) described watching the movie as an experience that is sick and grotesque, and how “You, feel, for lack of a better word, ick watching it” (para. 4). He goes on to critique Doucouré's camera angles as they captured “the revolting dance routines too well” and appeared “a little too loving and not nearly horrified enough” (Bunch, 2020a, para. 5). While he did not mention IMDb directly, our analyses revealed the most recurring narrative in IMDb reviews, both from critics and supporters of the film, was “The movie is uncomfortable to watch or disturbing.”
Counter to Bunch's commentaries were the pieces by Doucouré (2020b) and Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah (2020), both of whom identified as Black women from immigrant communities. Each explained the ways in which Black bodies continue to be demeaned and devalued. Attiah (2020) chastised American conservatives for scrutinizing the agency of Black women and girls in creative works such as WAP by Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion and Cuties and forgetting “Black women and girls were once treated as property” (para. 3). She continued to tick off other examples of “trauma porn” media, showing women dying in childbirth or “girls bleeding and crying from genital mutilation” in Africa and American Black women being “body-slammed” by police (Attiah, 2020, para. 5). Doucouré (2020b) wrote she wanted to “open people's eyes to what's truly happening in schools and on social media, forcing them to confront images of young girls made up, dressed up and dancing suggestively to imitate their favorite pop icon” (para. 8). The 96-min film was meant to empathize with the uncomfortable nature of being a tween negotiating between two cultures, French and Senegalese (Doucouré, 2020a).
Hypersexualization of Black Girls’ Bodies
The prevailing narrative about Doucouré's malicious intentions for including minors in the film's cast, as well as close-up shots of the girls dancing in provocative ways, were surmised from controversy generated around the suggestive poster (Netflix, 2020) used to promote the film in the United States. The French version featured The Cuties on the same visual plane skipping and swinging shopping bags; the American depiction showed Amy in the foreground, squatted with her legs splayed open in her scantily clad blue dancing uniform (see Figure 3). The other Black character, Coumba, posed in a sexually charged position, bent over to simulate being on all fours.
Netflix's promotional poster (left) sparked controversy for its representation of Amy and The Cuties in suggestive poses. The poster does not mirror the more whimsical image of the tweens (right) after shopping, which Maïmouna Doucouré used for her French film release.
Netflix's decision—which garnered a public apology and subscriber and conversative backlash—countered Doucouré's original intent of innocence gone awry and reinforced the Jezebel stereotype (Collins, 2000; Schiffer, 2021). The portrayal became doubly problematic with the White character standing up in a more dominant and powerful pose. Her raised arm demonstrated a sign of victory. The juxtaposition illustrated Whiteness as pure and Blackness as degenerative (Carby, 1992).
Although Netflix amended the poster, the new image still strayed away from the intersectional story Doucouré intended to tell and reinforced stereotypical and sexist representations of Black women and girls. Amy's pouty mouth appeared in the foreground and the other characters mimicked her. The three girls of color's pouts were visible, whereas the White girl's pout was covered by Coumba's head in front of her (see Figure 4). We contend despite efforts to change marketing strategies, the newer versions continued to reinforce negative assumptions about Black girlhood.
Netflix replaced its contested promotional poster after an apology and disseminated an equally charged image of the tweens with a seductive pout.
The IMDb reviews contained a tone of disgust, repulsion, and aversion, which, according to the viewers, often led them to not finish the movie. We interpreted these comments as reinforcing the subnarrative embedded around how the film constitutes a deliberate attempt to sexualize minors. Aligning with Bunch's (2020a) statements, IMDb reviewers asserted they, too, found the imagery difficult to watch. One commenter detailed the body parts accentuated in the film and questioned: “How is that not sexualizing children, we get several minute long dance sequences of this. The same story could have been told without the blatant sexualization of children” (betchaareoffendedeasily, 2022).
Another commentator followed by mentioning Cuties being worse than The Room (2003), which is about a kidnapped girl who spent 10 years in the captor's basement. “The cinematography felt really disturbing. Camera shots of the little girls’ body, for no reason, made me feel so uncomfortable” (potatochip00, 2022). These narratives echoed the discourses found in the three letters by legislators—crafted on official United States House of Representatives and Senate letterhead. Elected officials used their legislative powers to demand the film be investigated for displaying coached “simulated sexual acts” (Hawley, 2020, para. 1) and violating federal child pornography laws defined by 18 U.S.C. 2256 (Banks, 2020; Cruz, 2020).
We contend this reflected a male-legislative-gaze perspective that overshadowed the filmmaker's intent. Legislators foregrounded sexually related content in context with the law as a strategy to legitimize their claims. And the use of legal jargon lent formality and validity to sexist and racist underlying arguments.
Conservative Human and Nonhuman Social Actors
In U.S. Senator Ted Cruz's (2020) letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, he called on it to investigate content featuring dances. He viewed they “routinely fetishizes and sexualizes these pre-adolescent girls” (Cruz, 2020, para. 2). While Cruz acknowledged First Amendment artistic freedoms in the last paragraph, he foregrounded physical offenses such as “simulation of sexual activities” and “exposing a minor's bare breast” in the first paragraph (Cruz, 2020, para. 1). Furthermore, the letter contained a series of terms such as “sexualizes,” “child pornography,” and “nudity,” in proximity to “pre-adolescent,” “girls,” and “children.”
The language and the select images from the film served as evidence in a state-funded Texas grand jury indictment led by Lucas Babin, a former actor turned Tyler County, Texas district attorney. The five indictments and cases wove through the legal system with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, upholding the district court's decision 3–0 that the claim of child pornography was filed in “bad faith” (Netflix, Incorporated v. Babin, 2023). The Appeals’ justices crafted a rich-filled argument, layered with details. We learned about the three members of Congress, who “expressed their senatorial scorn for the film” (Netflix, Incorporated v. Babin, 2023, p. 4). We discovered Babin did watch the whole film but used editing software to extract specific scenes from the movie for the grand jury formal accusation; the jurors did not see the whole film only the scenes of Amy's spiritual cleansing in a tank top and underwear and a brief glimpse of an adult woman's breast on The Cuties’ social media. We received insight into the actions of Babin, as he stopped and started proceedings, making him the only person in the United States to charge Netflix for alleged child pornography in Cuties (Netflix, Incorporated v. Babin, 2023). He employed both moral and cultural capital to keep this case on the docket for more than three years (Woodward, 2018).
Babin did join Cruz (2020) and U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri (2020), both Republican conservatives, in their “scorn” of the film. Hawley (2020) wanted to know in his letter to Netflix executives if the Cuties content would encourage copycat behavior by pedophiles and promote the exploitation of child actors (Hawley, 2020). His concerns appeared accusatory and judgmental, as evidenced by the following question posed: “Did Netflix, at any point, take measures to ensure the protection of the physical, mental, and emotional health of child actors made to perform simulated sex acts and filmed in sexual or sexually suggestive ways?” (Hawley, 2020). In Cruz's (2020) and Hawley's (2020) letters, the narratives suggested the film promoted sexualized portrayals of minors to generate profit.
This exact logic was replicated in the IMDb's review section among detractors of the movie, as expressed in comments where users try to analyze the director's intent with the camera angles and content. User EddieSixx (2022) wrote: The idea that it was made this way in order to entice sick people is even more insidious, but I won't say this wasn't the intent. Otherwise, why use the camera angles and close-ups inappropriately that this film uses? (…) It is at least disgusting, and more likely just plain evil.
Drawing on Muhammad and McArthur's (2015) study results about Black girlhood portrayals, we contend the overemphasis of sexual language was coined in the unconscious association between sex-related labors and Black female bodies. This affected the perception and judgment of Black female young bodies as those typical of “hos and strippers” while contributing to perpetuate stereotypes about young Black girls. Second, when analyzing the rationale behind the statements contained in the letters and the comments, we noticed aversion and disapproval of content linked to a violation of morals and values. However, it is not the sexualization of minors that concerns detractors but the explicitness with which it is carried out—whether they are aware of this or not. Bringing this result into the macro cosmos of feminine body sexualization within and outside the entertainment industry, we can affirm Cuties does not present an unknown reality. Portrayals of oversexualized children exist in mainstream products (some users mentioned TLC's show Toddlers & Tiaras and Dance Moms). Although this audience was exposed to sexualized content in other forms of media, we concluded they do not seem to perceive it as such.
On the other hand, while the film's supporters also manifested experiencing discomfort when watching these scenes, they recognized the director's intent to raise awareness about the naturalization and encouragement of sexualization of female bodies in preadolescence. They viewed the inappropriate depictions as a deliberate decision to criticize the sexualization of minors and refuted the intention that the filmmaker depicted minors in a sexual manner for profitable reasons and to appeal to pedophiles. The following reviews by Val-Soph (2021) and jhester9614 (2021) illustrated these perspectives, respectively: The movie is horrifying on purpose, don't you get it? The camera is the male gaze. The girls (children) are trying to fit in, they don't even know what those dances represent, it is not sexual to them. They see singers, dancers on YT and think that's what is cool and that's what means to be a woman. Those are their role models. It was creepy, sure, but the audiences and adults in the movies found it creepy, Amy found it to be not freeing too. It wasn't like Lolita where the adult man justified it in his head, the adults around the Cuties were like “ew, no” while the CAMERA justified. I think that's a good lesson. The camera justified it, not the audience.
To think about the processes and influences affecting discourses, we expanded our central question to explore how the influence of socioeconomic and cultural factors affected interpretations and judgments of media products. A significant tension evident in several reviews revolved around the clash between art cinema and mainstream cinema. Users argued that Cuties was originally crafted as an art film, tailored to a specific audience accustomed to this type of production. However, the United States release garnered a broader audience and struggled to “fully decode its genuine meaning” and the director's “true intentions.” This argument warranted further analysis and exploration.
However, when analyzing the discourse promoted by conservative representatives, we observed them promote a fundamental opposition based on morality. Yet, what our analysis shows is a relatively homogeneous moral consensus among IMDb users, which nevertheless produced different judgment outcomes due to a highly disparate distribution of cultural capital among them. Drawing on the lines of Crotty's (2015) definition of polarized politics as “the condition of hyper partisan/ideological extremism, policy representational imbalance, and institutional paralysis (…) due to a divisiveness that moves well beyond normal politics and political parties to the end points of the United States’ ideological spectrum” (p. 1). We argue it is possible that politicians’ discourse about the film and other matters falls under this political phenomenon. Parekh (2006) and Borbáth et al. (2023) analyzed discourses supporting this type of politics and concluded these discourses target people based on specific features and then attribute to them a set of undesirable constitutive qualities. This contributes to the stigmatization of the targeted group.
In the case at hand, at least 11.8% of the reviews included direct or indirect criticism of progressives or conservatives as a rationale for explaining another reviewer's reasons for rejecting or approving the film. Reviews criticizing conservatives mentioned their “Puritanism and idiotic moralism,” and categorized them as “a religious army.” Conversely, some reviewers expressed disapproval of people who liked the film, either addressing them indirectly or explicitly for their lack of morality. Examples of shame and social disapproval appeared (e.g., if you like this movie you should feel disappointed in yourself). A fewer number of reviews also included ad hominem attacks claiming the twisted or sick personality of the people liking the film.
Conclusion
The analysis explored the controversy over Netflix's streaming movie, Cuties. We looked at the scorn of human and nonhuman actors; the analysis of mainstream media; and the faulty implementation of a streaming service's shortsighted promotional plan. When we embarked on this study, we wanted to analyze the mediated space and child pornography claims against Black bodies in the United States. What emerged was an arm of the conservative news culture in motion, where social actors of the movement (Schiffer, 2021) leveraged their positions to attract attention from mainstream news, social media outlets, and legal and legislative branches to move forward with their agenda. Doucouré's, film highlighting a young Black girl's coming-of-age story, appeared to be primed for this social experiment. We contend her intentions to raise awareness about hypersexualization of pre-adolescent girls became co-opted and embroiled in pornography-laced language and the United States First Amendment law.
Crenshaw (1991) and Collins (2000) addressed these similar dynamics in the 2 Live Crew case, when the group faced charges for lewd lyrics and performances in the 1990s. We, too, question the intentions of the legislators in this case and how they ignited a segment of the electorate to attack Doucouré's (2020a) resistance project and her personally with death threats (Carras, 2020). Netflix executives, to their credit, did not desert the project, litigating it through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, as Texas’ Babin raised a series of flaring indictments.
Cuties was vulnerable. Hobson (2002) argued Mulvey's (1992/2012) theory about the male gaze does not account for the reactions when a Black body enters the cinematic frame. The historical scripts linked to colonialism and chattel slavery and the Great Migration conjured up interlocking systems of oppression. Doucouré (2020a) tried to rewire hegemonic views about Blackness, immigration, preadolescence, and Islam. Even Black watchers of the film found it lacked respectability and disrupted their nostalgic scripts about Black girlhood (Shakes & Thelamour, 2023). But we contend the leveraging of media systems by elite actors of the United States conservative news culture ecosystem dominated the discourse.
Scholars such as Paulo Freire (1985) have explored how factors such as gender and race intersect and add layers of complexity to the distribution of knowledge, capital, and power. The social system transforms into a battleground where actors with diverse worldviews vie for the imposition of their perspectives. Diverse political sectors and the media strategically handle long-standing conflicts without considering whether the narratives they promote benefit the unity of the country or not.
By reducing the discussion to a matter of morality, discourses such as the one promoted by the politicians created a simplified and narrow perception of the “other.” This approach makes it easier to target others, often based on criticism of assumed ideological convictions driving their actions. Our intention is not to dismiss the impact of ideology on people's decisions or behavior, but rather to draw attention to the striking similarity between the narratives identified in the reviews and the argumentative structure used in the other data sets. This alignment is not coincidental; it reflects the age of polarized politics in which we are operating and how its logic can be traced back to the judgment elaboration processes that take place in everyday life.
Furthermore, in the digital age, the complexities of the above-mentioned problem are magnified as nonhuman actors play a significant role in the gatekeeping process. News aggregators, bots, and algorithms wield immense power (Noble, 2018) in determining the information everyone receives, influencing their perceptions, and shaping their beliefs. These automated systems are designed to prioritize content that generates higher engagement and profit for companies that own search engines and social media platforms (Bucher, 2020).
Consequently, individuals such as those writing the IMDb reviews, are exposed to a filtered and tailored stream of information, such as The Washington Post's columns, that caters to their preexisting beliefs, reinforce their existing opinions, and create an echo chamber effect. This selective exposure to information not only perpetuates confirmation bias but also contributes to polarization within society. As people become confined to their echo chambers, their perspectives are insulated from alternative viewpoints, making it increasingly difficult to foster constructive dialogue and empathy across ideological divides (Banisch et al., 2022). Throughout this paper, we explored the intricate connections of this moralistic discourse with others that not only dismiss the filmmaker's approach by overlooking the prefilm research process and the Doucouré's personal experience as a Senegalese immigrant but also propagate this misguided and distorted version of both the movie and its creator.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
