Chisme/Gossip as Dialogic Knowledge Production and Literacies for Woman and Girls of Color

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

Abstract

Women, girls, and femmes of color have reimagined and mobilized chisme/gossip as a hidden-in-plain sight way of knowing and learning in resistance to white heteropatriarchal worlds. Although chisme/gossip is a form of discourse has been maligned as trivial, cruel, and unintellectual, especially when associated with women and girls, the authors suggest that chisme/gossip can be understood as a humanizing, (Paris & Winn, 2014), fugitive knowledge-building practice. 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 and pedagogies 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 literacy practice of women and girls. The practice is grounded in 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, it offers reflects the co-creation of knowledge that takes place 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 literacy among women, girls, and femmes of color. In drawing from various research projects and popular culture, 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 literacy practice resists dominant ideas of knowledge production as it expands who can create knowledge and where and how knowledge can emerge. Through these familiar practices, 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 literacies 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