Towards a politicisation of Hello Kitty: a first look what's involved :-)

I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream – The New Inquiry:

"Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth? Is its absence more than an expedient, minimalist design choice? And does her lack of a mouth necessarily translate into the absence of a voice, as the arguments tend to go? The first Hello Kitty product, after all, was a coin purse with HELLO printed in block capitals over an image of Kitty; her name is her form, and it is speech.

Most political engagements with Hello Kitty have taken the mouthlessness issue as their impetus. They generally, through subversion or perversion, ironize Hello Kitty’s apparent inability to speak, suggesting her lack of expression is being upheld as a model, particularly for the young Asian girls who form Hello Kitty’s immediate target audience. A woman’s value, this particular feminine feline’s lack of mouth seems to say, is contingent on her voicelessness."

What I find interesting is that the whole corpus of modern Literary Theory & cultural studies etc. is normally applied to works of high literature etc. As I understand it, once, applying theory to "contemporary" cultural artifacts was seen as avant-guarde and radical. Now, one could argue that it is these artifacts that need more thought than ever applied to them.