Chisme/Gossip as a Fugitive Methodology of Woman and Girl of Color Literacies

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

The ingenuity of women/girls/femmes of color has allowed them to reimagine and mobilize chisme/gossip—a form of discourse most frequently associated with women and girls, and has been maligned as trivial, cruel, and unintellectual—as a hidden-in-plain sight way of knowing and learning in resistance to white heteropatriarchal worlds. The authors suggest that chisme/gossip can be a humanizing methodological approach (Paris & Winn, 2014), as researchers and participants in woman/girl/femme of color centered research create fugitive knowledge-building collectives through the relational, embodied, and resistant nature of chisme/gossip. In doing so, the authors build on woman of color definitions of gossip/chisme to analyze its resistant utility for women/girls/femmes of color. Lisa Lowe (1996), for example, defines gossip as a “popular discourse that interrupts and displaces official representational regimes” (p. 113), serving as a spontaneous and mutivocal challenge to dominant deficitizing narratives, as it exaggerates and reiterates salient moments for the tellers, thereby often highlighting felt injustice.
Dialogue has been central to critical methodologies in literacy studies. Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) theorize the dialogic spiral, the process of generating new knowledge between speakers when trust and vulnerability are established. Scholars have also discussed how cultured and gendered storytelling practices such as pláticas (Fierros & Delgado-Bernal, 2016), testimonios (Saavedra, 2011), and autohistorias (Anzaldúa, 2002) serve women of color as methods of collective and resistant knowledge building. Thus, storytelling, dialogue, engaged listening are central to understanding chisme as a methodology. The practice is grounded intimacy, reflection, and healing, as it opens space to discuss and share experiences of marginalization, new knowledge, and important insight for surviving, navigating, and resisting institutions and oppressive systems. Further, as a methodology, it offers opportunities for researchers to come together with participants in everyday spaces and mundane practices to build theory among women, girls, and femmes (kitchen table, home, spiritual/religious spaces) (Delgado Bernal, et al., 2006; Haddix, 2012; Haddix, et al, 2016; Trinidad Galvan, 2006; Villenas, 2005). In these spaces, women/girls/femmes share the stories of their lives, recast themselves as the hero of these stories, protect one another, warn one another, teach one another.
In this paper, the authors discuss chisme/gossip as a fugitive methodological approach to literacy research with women, girls, and femmes of color. In drawing from various research projects, they provide examples of how this practice becomes a humanizing method and opens up a space to theorize from and through the lives, narratives, and experiences of participants. Chisme/Gossip as methodology resists dominant ideas of method and approaches to qualitative research as it expands who can “do” research, who is a researcher, and where research can take place. Through these familiar practices, researchers alongside other women, girls, and femmes of color theorize what it means to be a woman/girl/femme of color, what justice for women/girls/femmes of color looks like, and what research can and should look like among and for these communities. Chisme, thus, becomes an inroad to these theorizations.

Authors

• Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs