Why GOSSIP?

Gossip is most often used pejoratively, habitually associated with casual or idle conversation about other people’s private lives. It is often associated with rumour or trivia, it is ‘low’ culture and everyday, not serious endeavour, objective analysis or intellectual.

However, in the tradition of feminist and radical scholarship, we want to challenge these taken for granted meanings, invert established logic and un-pack conventional binaries. It is significant that dictionary definitions frequently use gendered language and examples to illustrate gossip’s negative connotation. Historically and at present, in both the global north and south, it is common that women, and other marginalised groups are chastised and silenced by the interdiction that they should not gossip with each other undermining and delegitimising their political organising, often in private spaces.

So, in our celebration of gossip, we are rejecting the normative logic that debate and discourse should be reserved for other more serious agents and public arenas.  It builds on decades of scholarship in human geography and other social sciences that illustrates that the ‘trivial’, ‘everyday’ and ‘private’ spaces and relations are centrally important to social life and therefore academic analysis. We take interdisciplinary insight from the suggestion that gossip may have an evolutionary function as a mechanism for gaining and sharing information and building alliances and networks of thinking and action.

Finally, we seek solidarity by embracing gossip’s original meaning emerging from a community of confidants and neighbours who give support during difficult times. In and through GOSSIP we seek to support and encourage critical thinking and the gestation of novel ideas and alternative action so as to (re)produce the world anew.