Susanne C. Ylönen holds a PhD in Art Education and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Her doctoral dissertation The Fighting Crab Monster (2016, in Finnish) explored the field of child cultural horror and delineated how different aesthetic choices such as aesthetic sublimation (fear and awe inspiring renditions), aestheticization (beautifying approaches) and aesthetic sublation (disgust inducing, possibly humorously degrading interpretations) are used within discourses such as risk speech, cute talk, psychologization and peer cultural meaning making in order to achieve particular performative aims from spreading horror to containing and ridiculing it. Currently she works on the subject of aesthetic sublation as a form of pop cultural meaning making, tracing convergences of, for example, disgust and cuteness in diverse case studies from Hodor doorstops to zombie picturebooks and violent clowns. Her research is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation Programme under grant agreement No 770045.
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