Chismosas Against White Heteropatriarchy: Chisme/Gossip as a Literacy Pedagogy of Resistant Girlhood/Womanhood

• In Event: 43.020 - Women of Color Modalities of Meaning-Making: Endarkened Feminist Knowledge Production in Education

Abstract

Chisme/Gossip, a form of discourse most frequently associated with women and girls, has been maligned as trivial, as cruel, and as unintellectual. It is a literacy that women and girls are enculturated into and, in turn, shamed for participating in. This paper will explore the ways that gossip is, in fact, an intellectual and political discourse that women and girls of color utilize in the face of racist, sexist, and classist structures. Rooted in experiential knowledges and drawing from empirical work with girls of color, the authors of this paper theorize a framing for exploring chisme/gossip as a pedagogy of resistant girlhood/womanhood. This literacy pedagogy facilitates a process of meaning making that taps into feminized knowledge, re-defining how women and girls work through experiences and vulnerabilities and, in turn, begin to heal from the intersecting violences of White hetero-patriarchy.
The authors build on women of color definitions of gossip/chisme to analyze its resistant utility for women and girls of color. Lisa Lowe (1996), for example, defines gossip as a “popular discourse that interrupts and displaces official representational regimes” (p. 113). Lowe discusses the ways that gossip can serve as a spontaneous and mutivocal challenge to dominant deficitizing narratives, as gossip exaggerates and reiterates salient moments for the tellers. Chisme/Gossip can change remembering in a way that highlights dissonant and subversive narratives for its interlocutors. Chisme/Gossip, thus, exposes the lived intellectuality that girls and women of color take up in a variety of spaces. These spaces include the home and specifically the kitchen table (Delgado Bernal, et al., 2006; Trinidad Galvan, 2006; Haddix, 2012; Haddix, et al, 2016). The kitchen table, traditionally viewed as a gathering space for women, is a place to share the stories of their lives, recast themselves as the hero of these stories, protect one another, warn one another, teach one another. Further, chisme/gossip takes place across and through a variety of modalities, including but not limited to talk, written text, digital sharing, and without a doubt, grounded in the embodied knowledge of women and girls of color (Cruz, 2006; Johnson & Vasudevan, 2012).
The authors center the educational narratives of girls and women of color within this theoretical paper to, (1) re-position girls of color in the classroom as holders and producers of knowledge, (2) acknowledge and honor the literacies and contours of chisme/gossip as intellectual processes of meaning making and (3) to center the truths of girls and women of color in academic spaces. This work contributes to conversations in the field around humanizing pedagogies rooted in the lives, affective realities, and the mundane practices of marginalized communities. The authors argue that chisms/gossip not only has pedagogical implications for exploring raced-gendered knowledge production, but also for exposing the teaching and learning that takes place for the survival, resistance, and resistance of women and girls of color.

Authors

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Texas at El Paso