The selection committee reported, “Ngai’s essay offers a thoughtful examination of how Lolita fashion is created, promoted, and circulated within Japanese culture. It skillfully applies a transnational framework to Lolita marketing, which provides welcome insights into youth cultural production and consumption in a non-US context. Furthermore, her study affirms fashion as a medium in its own right where cultural scripts and ideologies are (re)produced, negotiated, and contested. Her close attention to whiteness, in particular, underscores a larger globalized tension and political struggle between Japanese culture and Western culture more broadly that shapes the consumption of postfeminist media culture in a manner that transcends received understandings.” 

The jury's comment: "A detailed and knowledgable approach to the study of Shirley Temple, this essay makes a valuable contribution to the fields of motherhood and star studies. It is a unique piece of work within the crowded field of star studies in the classical Hollywood period, drawing from both newspapers and fan magazines, as well as biographical materials." 

"Cuteness does matter. It carries important social and ideological consequences."