Abstract
Gossip, rumor, hearsay, tittle-tattle, scuttlebutt, scandal, dirt. Whatever the term, gossip is one of the most common—and most condemned—forms of discourse in which we engage. Around two-thirds of our daily conversation focuses on personal and interpersonal matters. If we were to keep a record of our activities during our waking hours, according to anthropologist Max Gluckman, only our time spent in work would exceed our time spent in gossiping.1 Gossip is a consummate human activity and occurs across time and space. Scholars have discovered gossip’s prevalence in a range of cultures, and Robin Dunbar has suggested “that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”2 Yet, even as gossip is intensely involving and interesting, it is also widely denigrated. At best, gossip is trivial and idle; at worst, it is invasive and destructive. Religious injunctions against both relaying and receiving gossip appear in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic texts, and concerns about the moral ramifications of gossip continue.3 The long association of gossip and women has strengthened these negative evaluations. Cultural aphorisms—such as the Danish “The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word” and the Chinese “The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she never lets it become rusty”—confirm this view.4
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Notes
Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 79.
For some early scholarship on gossip, see, for example, Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Russell and Russell, 1947)
Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (oxford: Berg, 2006), 97–99.
Nicholas Emler, “Gossip, Reputation, and Social Adaptation,” in Good Gossip, ed. Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 118.
Nicholas Hammond, Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (1610–1715), vol. 9 in Medieval and Early Modern French Studies (oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 1–2.
Joseph Epstein, Gossip (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 85, 214.
Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (new York: Knopf, 1996)
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (new York: Vintage, 2003), and Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)
John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (new York: Oxford University Press, 1982)
Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (new York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Terri L. Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001)
Cynthia A. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America (new York: Palgrave, 2004).
Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (new York: Viking, 2007)
Andrew Burstein and Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (new York: Random House, 2010).
Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999)
Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (new York: Knopf, 1994)
Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (new York: Palgrave, 2001)
Mary Desjardins, “‘Marion Never Looked Lovelier,’ Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood and the Negotiation of Glamour in Post-war Hollywood,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16/3.4 (1997): 421–437, “Systemizing Scandal: Confidential Magazine, Stardom, and the State of California,” in Headline Hollywood: 100 Years of Film Scandal, ed. Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 206–231, and “Maureen O’Hara’s Confidential Life: Recycling Stars Through Gossip and Moral Biography,” in Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s, ed. Janet Thumin (london: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 118–130.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (new York: Knopf, 1985), 25–26; Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995), 19–22.
Niko Besnier, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 14.
Gail Collins, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics (new York: William Morrow, 1998), 6.
Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages (1846), translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) as quoted in Sissela Bok, Gossip: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (new York: Vintage, 1984), 90.
Jörg R. Bergmann, Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip, translated by John Bednarz, Jr. (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 54.
See, for example, Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
Val Holley, Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003)
Jennifer Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism (new York: New York University Press, 2011)
and Erin A. Meyers, Dishing Dirt in the Digital Age: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Participatory Media Culture (new York: Peter Lang, 2013).
Justine Coupland (ed.) Small Talk (harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2000), 7.
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (new York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Besnier, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, 3; Luise White, “Between Gluckman and Foucault: Historicizing Rumour and Gossip,” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 20.1 (1994): 75–92
Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6.
On gossip and rumor, see also Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
and Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (new York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in The Interpretation of Cultures (new York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.
Emler, “Gossip, Reputation, and Social Adaptation,” 135; Sylvia Schein, “Used and Abused: Gossip in Medieval Society,” in Good Gossip, 152
Shoshana Blum-Kulka, “Gossipy Events at Family Dinners: Negotiating Sociability, Presence and the Moral Order,” in Small Talk, 228; Bergmann, Discreet Indiscretions, 58.
Besnier, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, 12
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985)
Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke, Gossip: The Inside Scoop (new York: Plenum Press, 1987), 193.
Alan Wolfe, “Public and Private in Theory and Practice: Some Implications of an Uncertain Boundary,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 191, 195
Paul Apostolidis and Juliet A. Williams (eds.) Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 9–10.
Lenore Davidoff, “Gender and the ‘Great Divide’: Public and Private in British Gender History,” Journal of Women’s History 15 (Spring 2003): 22.
Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (new York: Elsevier, 1976), 11.
Claire Bond Potter, “Sex, Lies, and Political History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.3 (September 2006): 355–381.
White, “Between Gluckman and Foucault,” 87. Also see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3, 7.
McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 829n17; Robert Wernick, “When It Comes to Gossip, We’re All-Ears Listeners,” Smithsonian 23 (February 1993): 77.
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© 2014 Kathleen A. Feeley and Jennifer Frost
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Feeley, K.A., Frost, J. (2014). Introduction. In: Feeley, K.A., Frost, J. (eds) When Private Talk Goes Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442307_1
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