Bi-monthly essays by our in-house writer, Caterina Capelli, covering the most inspiring stories we find along the way.
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ILLUSTRATION BY
Andrea Chronopoulos
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ISSUE N.16
October 28, 2024
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Why we should reclaim Gossip – And summon our inner Witch
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A personal essay for your Halloween.
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Mentioning “gossip,” you’ll probably think of flashy tabloids filled with fabricated celebrity scoops. Or you might picture a group of girlfriends engaged in small talk, making remarks behind somebody’s back. Some might even recall the TV series “Gossip Girl,” whose eponymous character – anonymously spreading rumors online with disastrous consequences – is eventually discovered not to be a girl but a young man. Gossip, the stereotype goes, is a feminine prerogative, a social ritual performed by groups of women. Yet, it’s synonymous with idle, backbiting chatter, potentially sowing discord – the antithesis of female solidarity and friendship.
In her illuminating piece On the meaning of Gossip, feminist philosopher Silvia Federici retraces the word’s origins back to medieval Anglo-Saxon, where “gossip” meant simply “female companion” and “gossips” referred to a group of female friends. In rural medieval England, women cooperated with each other in every aspect of their life. They sewed, washed their clothes, and gave birth surrounded by other women, with men rigorously excluded. How the term’s meaning evolved from indicating women’s friendship to malevolent and potentially damaging conversations says a lot about the strategies the patriarchy has employed (and still employs) to isolate and control women, as well as their social lives.
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“It felt as if I had been fed a poisonous potion leading me into believing that girls didn’t belong together; that women friendships were rare exceptions; that the infamous “female rivalry” was a natural condition instead of a product of patriarchy.”
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Federici’s words deeply resonated with me when I first read the essay a couple of years ago. They left me with the uncomfortable feeling – impossible to ignore – that I had been deceived. It felt as if I had been fed a poisonous potion leading me –worse, manipulating me – into believing something that wasn’t true: that girls didn’t belong together, that women’s friendships were rare exceptions; that the infamous “female rivalry” was a natural condition instead of a product of patriarchy. Now, I could see the pattern.
A specific passage of the essay felt especially illuminating: “Attaching a denigrating meaning to the term indicating friendship among women served to destroy the female sociality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, when most of the activities women performed were of a collective nature and, in the lower classes at least, women formed a tight-knit community that was the source of a strength unmatched in the modern era,” Federici writes. The philosopher points out how gossip’s semantic shift matches the establishment of the land enclosures in the 15th century, which privatized public land for the benefit of a few landlords. The enclosures – what many historians mark as the beginning of capitalism – left most of the population deprived of the land’s resources, forcing them to rely on wages for survival. “Similarly, it was necessary that a woman be dependent on her husband to perform the unwaged labor of social reproduction within the home,” she continues in the essay. Those who were unmarried or without anybody to support them were left isolated and poor, leading to the appearance of a largely female underclass. In this context, the figure of the Witch was born. Women started to be persecuted and brutally tortured for “Performing magic,” meaning doing what they had always been doing: working as midwives, healers, and herbalists – activities that allowed them to support themselves, but also conferred them particular influence and power within their communities. The witch-hunt thus emerged as a way to police women and their potentially subversive activities. It shaped a new model of womanhood – “sexless, obedient, resigned to subordination to the male world” – to which women had to conform to be accepted. As a highly gendered word, the meaning of gossip was changed to accommodate the needs of an emerging capitalist society: Female sociality was discouraged, fearing that it would undermine the husband’s authority in the family.
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Through Federici’s writing, I quickly realized I had been embracing the stereotype of the witchy and bitchy myself without even knowing it. In high school, I only had one girlfriend – the rest of my friends were boys. I always felt more comfortable hanging out with them, or so I thought. Speaking with my now numerous girlfriends, most confess the same: “I’ve always had more male friends,” Erica told me. “I was more at ease that way. We did competitive physical activities. Girls were bitchy.” This obviously sounds absurd to my adult self. Though I still deeply cherish the male friends I made in high school, I now realize that my preference for hanging out with them was partly driven by a need for approval to boost my teenage self-esteem. A similar mindset made me competitive and wary of my female peers. I don’t know precisely when things shifted for me. At university, I started a design project with an older girl who became one of my best friends – and I recall how everything started very naturally, chatting about sex between classes before even introducing each other. Later on, finding myself in a toxic relationship with no apparent way out, I clung to other women for support and learned from their experiences shared in cafès and at aperitivo. I began to strengthen bonds with girls from my hometown who I never considered much before. Over time, I began craving comfortable spaces to chat, share ideas and confessions, or just have fun together. Safe spaces where being understood and supported felt easy. Spaces without men.
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“As a highly gendered word, the meaning of gossip was changed to accommodate the needs of an emerging capitalist society: Female sociality was discouraged, fearing that it would undermine the husband’s authority in the family.”
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As I strive to emancipate myself from womanhood ideals I could no longer bear to identify with, gossip feels like a much-needed relief, a ritual of resistance and sisterhood. What was I even doing before finding my fellow witches? Finding resources for this essay hasn’t been easy. Google pushed the results I was looking for deeper down the funnel, so much so that, at first, I thought I was the only one researching this subject. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. But I had to turn to Are.na, an independent, alternative (and ad-free) social network, to get what I wasn’t finding elsewhere. Browsing its dark interface, I discovered contemporary artists, scholars, and writers reclaiming gossip in its original role of defender of non-men. In an essay for Tank Magazine, visual artist and critic Hannah Black frames gossip as “a secret language of friendship and resistance among women” and a tool to subvert dominant narratives.
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“In a world where sexual violence is an everyday danger with few or no consequences, networks of gossips do their best to let each other know who cannot be trusted, where you should be careful, who has been lucky and who has not.”
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Gossip's bad reputation speaks to its power as a form of communication and networking, and in recent history, compelling examples of this have been dominating the headlines. Knowledge of sexual misconduct and abuse circulated in the media industry without consequences for decades until, in 2017, a group of women posted online the infamous “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet, listing the names of powerful men who had assaulted or harassed them. Degraded as “gossip,” the allegations had been easily ignored. But the #MeToo movement – and the public show of solidarity among women it spurred – brought the “chit chats” and rumors inside criminal courts.
After being accused of racketeering, rape, and sex trafficking by 120 women, the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs is now held in custody, facing a life sentence. A person involved in the trial called Diddy’s misconduct “The biggest secret in the entertainment industry, that really wasn’t a secret at all.” Everybody knew. But mouths stayed shut. The secret was kept so the power and the money could, too. “Labeling the production of knowledge as ‘gossip’” – Federici writes in her book Caliban and the Witch – “Is the way in which women have been silenced and to this day excluded from many places where decisions are taken.” Had women’s voices been heard and taken seriously from the start, most victims would have been spared – in Diddy’s case, as in many others.
In a world where sexual violence is an everyday danger with few or no consequences, Hannah Black writes, “networks of gossips do their best to let each other know who cannot be trusted, where you should be careful, who has been lucky and who has not.”
Ultimately, what a relief to embrace my witchy self. To sit anywhere with my girlfriends – the more, the better. To play cards or plan a party – what a relief to discuss little or big projects. Or share – yes, why not! – the recipe for that home-made kefir. I can’t wait to tell them what I just learned about the true meaning of gossip. 😈
Happy Halloween!
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