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Okay, so I'm in a seminar with two other grad students and a number of undergrads and two of the undergrads are just really annoying me with their self-involvement and their... well, mainly their self-involvement. There's BlondeChick, who feels the need to go on long wandering monologues about how, for example, someone's race does not affect his or her ability to be a good, effective representative for any community, and she should know because she's been a senate page. This is when we're talking about depictions of Chinese-Americans in popular culture.
Then there's HawaiianChick, who needs us all to listen to how much she was disappointed in the reading because it discussed "stupid miner songs" and "history" instead of "popular culture" because "pop culture didn't come until there was media. Like, there were songs in the fifties, but I can't relate to them. That's not pop culture."
KIVRIN: [Offers a somewhat more useful definition of 'popular culture' as something produced for mass consumption and widely distributed, and suggests that the songs written in the late nineteenth century about conflict between European-Americans and Chinese immigrants in California during the gold rush period and distributed in popular magazines fall under that definition.]
HAWAIIANCHICK: Yeah, but it's history. Not pop culture. And the book says on the cover that it's going to be about pop culture. I really didn't like it.
KIVRIN: [Considers throwing her paper cup of rosehip tea at HawaiianChick's head.]
It doesn't help that HawaiianChick has cast herself as The Arbiter of the Asian-American Experience, over the other six or seven people in the room of Asian background.
I like many of the readings in this class. I like the prof. And after the first jarring half-hour, I'm usually okay with my classmates. But today, oh, today I wanted to boot the chicks out the door.
Then there's HawaiianChick, who needs us all to listen to how much she was disappointed in the reading because it discussed "stupid miner songs" and "history" instead of "popular culture" because "pop culture didn't come until there was media. Like, there were songs in the fifties, but I can't relate to them. That's not pop culture."
KIVRIN: [Offers a somewhat more useful definition of 'popular culture' as something produced for mass consumption and widely distributed, and suggests that the songs written in the late nineteenth century about conflict between European-Americans and Chinese immigrants in California during the gold rush period and distributed in popular magazines fall under that definition.]
HAWAIIANCHICK: Yeah, but it's history. Not pop culture. And the book says on the cover that it's going to be about pop culture. I really didn't like it.
KIVRIN: [Considers throwing her paper cup of rosehip tea at HawaiianChick's head.]
It doesn't help that HawaiianChick has cast herself as The Arbiter of the Asian-American Experience, over the other six or seven people in the room of Asian background.
I like many of the readings in this class. I like the prof. And after the first jarring half-hour, I'm usually okay with my classmates. But today, oh, today I wanted to boot the chicks out the door.
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