As long as there has been a distinct youth culture, there have been cliques, but it is only in the wake of the recent high school shootings that these groups have been labeled potentially lethal. Consensus has it that the two adolescent gunmen at Columbine targeted Jocks, the popular athletes who picked on the Geeks and the Goths. If not for this social fragmentation, media commentators lamented, the incidents could have been prevented. Given recent events, it might not be the best time to call for another social designation. But as times change, so do social categories, and to leave a group unnamed would only prevent our ability to make common reference to it. While the generation coming of age in the '90s has been christened Generation X, its reigning elite has yet to be given a distinctive handle. My suggestion for this clique, identified by their chunky Buddy Holly glasses and their faux downtown sensibility, is Genks. Genk is short for intelligencia (pronounced in-tel-le-gen-ki-a), a misspelling of the word intelligentsia. This term owes its creation to an email I received from a member of my newspaper staff which exhorted me to change the location of our weekly meeting from Campus Club, a "Geek hangout," to the neighboring Terrace Club, the "stomping ground of Princeton's intelligencia." If you are going to associate yourself with the campus intelligentsia, I thought, the least you can do is to spell the word correctly. The unintended irony of this message captures the essence of Genk: Genks may pretend to be the final arbiter of the intellectual or the cutting-edge but they often talk without knowing what they are talking about. Take a group of trendy Princeton girls who crowed about their performance last year of the "radical feminist" play, "Clit Notes." A collection of monologues about female genitalia, "Clit Notes" said nothing that hadn't been said before in '60s manuals like Our Bodies, Our Selves. At the same time, a smaller and less pretentious production of Caryl Churchill's "Top Girls," which addressed the more serious issues of single motherhood and the feminization of poverty, passed below the campus radar screen. To Genks, progressive politics is nothing more than a fashion statement, to be paraded about along with their thrift store clothing and platform shoes. Wearing someone else's discarded My Little Pony t-shirt or gas station uniform tells the world that the wearer is above the conformity of mainstream fashion. Ditto for dropping a sentence or two about the liberal cause du jour. What's in: calling Guiliani a Nazi for his crackdown on strip clubs, scoffing at middle America's square attitude toward sexual experimentation, and denouncing the War on Drugs. What's out: race relations, foreign policy, and universal health care. At a party last weekend, one genky girl announced smugly, while lighting up a joint, that she is a "Republican's nightmare" because she's a "pot-smoking, bisexual, female school-teacher." Or maybe she's a Republican's dream because the only time that she pays attention to front page news is when Congress threatens to cut NEA funding. There is something taxonomically valuable about assigning names to as-yet-unnamed social phenomena. Once identified, Genks can take their place in social history alongside the cliques of decades past -- the Beats, the Greasers, the Hippies, and the Punks. But Genk is more than a social designation; it is an attitude to which everyone is susceptible. I have felt its pull myself when self-consciously sauntering across campus with my copy of The New Yorker, its cover prominently displayed. Genk is a name for the urge that we all have to name-drop, to talk intimately about authors and artists, using only their last names. It is the dangerous tendency to aestheticize our political and intellectual commitments, as if they were nothing more than the latest fad. --Leah Platt [return to main page] [go to next page] [Get your FREE subscription to Kruller] |