The Gossip Seminar
“By putting these two words together, I proposed to dismantle historical fiction that made gossip a misogynistic pejorative term with the intention of dismantling links between people who flee from patriarchal structures.”
From Fabiana Faleiros
Photos by Jenny Fonseca
The Gossip Seminar brings together two words from different places: one linked to academic knowledge and another to knowledge woven by different women. By putting these two words together, I proposed to dismantle historical fiction that made gossip a misogynistic pejorative term with the intention of dismantling links between people who flee from patriarchal structures.
Despite bringing ‘seminar’ in the name, the project did not happen in an auditorium or room where traditionally academic meetings are organized, with tables and chairs arranged in a way to delimit the place of the speaker and the listener. The space was an artistic installation made with rugs, curtains and cushions printed with phrases such as "What Family likes is Husband", "The sexual life of so and so", "Doctorate in patriarchy" etc. The first GS took place in 2018 at the ‘Imminence of Tragedy’ exhibition, FUNARTE SP [1]. It was a conversation proposition about the power relations performed by the white-cis-heteronormative structure of the cultural circuit. I had been through an abusive relationship and oscillated between writing a text-report and these short sentences on social media, but I decided to print them on pillows. I got together with other people who had gone through similar processes and created GS.
In 2015, the year in which feminist movements popularized the hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio (‘first assault’) to tell reoccurring stories of sexual harassment and abuse, I wrote my doctoral thesis and read the book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, in which Silvia Federici comments briefly on the relation of the resignification of the word gossip with the witch hunt in 16th century Europe:
"The sexual life of so and so"
“[...] friendships between women were considered suspicious, [...] as a subversion of the alliance between husband and wife, in the same way that relations between women were demonized by witch accusers who forced them to denounce others as accomplices to the crime of witchcraft. It was also during this period that the word gossip, which in the Middle Ages meant "friend", changed its meaning, acquiring a pejorative connotation.” [2]
Women targeted by the witch hunt were discouraged from sitting in front of their homes or near windows. They should not meet friends, nor visit their parents very often after the wedding. At the same time that the bourgeois ideals of femininity were formed, with the noble woman as a model, the poor women, the adulterers, the experts on medicinal herbs, were attacked by the collective force they had in the fight against the growing privatization of lands and the expropriation of bodies. In this context, in which global capitalism was being structured, the witch hunt was the model of domination for the colonization and enslavement of the native populations of the Americas and the Caribbean, along with the trafficking of enslaved people brought from Africa.
In my thesis, I connected Federici with this beginning of the 21st century, when social networks such as Facebook, which privatize communication on the Internet, use the word “friend” to mediate the relationship between people, who end up becoming followers. Friendships mediated by numbers of views, likes, fake news and cancellations [3]. At the same time, the resumption of a common space for exchange between women, via the hashtag #Metoo in 2017, continued to make us remember traumas confined to the private sphere — for some in an inaccessible place of the unconscious — in the public sphere of the Internet.
With this collective storytelling of abuse stories, we realized that we had all gone through similar and distinctive situations, noting our differences. And the GS's objective was precisely to connect private experiences with public discussions. A conversation between diverse women, non-binary people and dissident bodies interested in creating spaces of welcome and debate about abusive relationships sustained and silenced by patriarchy in the cultural circuit. There were meetings for the communication and debate of cases of denouncing harassment, abuse, rape, physical and psychological violence, theft of intellectual production, structural silencing, etc. We also share ways of carrying out direct actions in institutional and non-institutional spaces that reproduce colonialist logics that, given the strength with which our voice is organized, try to disqualify our speeches, especially when the abuser is named.
To Talk with the hands
The book Witches, Witch-hunting, and Women was published in 2018. I read the Brazilian edition [4], in 2019. In it, Federici writes a chapter that details the derogatory connotation acquired by the word gossip as one of the results of expropriation of common spaces in the witch hunt. Two centuries of attacks on women, from the late Middle Ages to the formation of modern England, made gossip become the opposite of its original meaning: from an expression that designated a close friend to futile conversation made by the damned who met to speak ill of someone, sowing discord. Gossip derives from the old English God (Deus) and sibb (godmother or godfather), the one who maintains a spiritual connection with a baptized child. Satirical theatrical representations expressed the growing misogyny showing women as “troublemakers, aggressive and ready to fight against their husbands” [5], with the aim of dismantling the autonomy and the community ties that existed between them.
“The destiny of the pretty is to be ugly.”
Among the instruments of torture used to punish low-class women suspected of witchcraft, there was a structure made of iron and leather that tore the tongue of those who tried to speak. Often called a ‘gossip bridle,’ the object was placed in public with women who defy silencing to terrorize others. Federici points to the fact that the same instrument was used to control enslaved people in the United States until the 18th century.
According to the ethnolinguist Yeda Pessoa de Castro6, the African languages spoken by the Bantu people, coming from Southern Africa, mainly from Angola, Congo and Mozambique, were the ones that most influenced the Portuguese spoken in Brazil. The word “Fofoca”, which according to the Aurélio Buarque de Holanda dictionary had its first official record only in 1975 as “gossip; backbiting,” derives from the term “fuka”, which in Bantu means “revolve, rummage”. Fuxico is also a word of African origin and means “patch; basting with needle and thread”. The artisanal technique, made with fabric scraps cut in circles and sewn in the center to form bundles of cloth, is also synonymous with gossip. Popular ‘fuxico’ handicraft, which comprise embroidery and applications in clothing, are a common practice made by women from the Brazilian northeast. Women gathered together ‘fuxico-ing.’ Women together, weaving memories and affections, keeping ancestral knowledge and the stories of their communities alive.
The voice, the pelvis
The first bone to form in the human body is the sphenoid. Located close to the mandible, it constitutes most of the base of the skull and nasal septum. It has a shape very similar to the pelvis — butterfly. But the resemblance is not just visual. There is a physiological connection between the sphenoid and the pelvis supported by the spine. The resumption of natural gynecology by diverse feminist networks has shown that the alignment and relaxation of one impact the other [7]. Vaginismus may be related to bruxism. Interrupted speech, secular silence, has to do with pains and difficulties to feel pleasure.
The creation of a science of gossip, by sewing the word seminar with gossip, involves the reappropriation of a knowledge of the body. The epistemological violence that made the word gossip, both in English as shown by Federici, and in Brazilian Portuguese, disqualifies speech among women. Disconnects the communication channels between voice and body. Retell, rewrite and reappropriate body connections from the pelvic floor to the mouth. Gossip as a political gesture, with the body that knows, to tell the stories that were not written.
Final Notes:
1- A second edition was held in 2019 at Ateliê 397, in the feminist study group Vozes Agudas.
2- FEDERICI, Silvia. “Calibán y la Bruja: Mujeres cuerpo y cumulación originalaria.” Spanish translation: Verónica Hendel and Leopoldo Sebastián Touza. Madrid: Traficante de sueños, 2010. p. 256.
3- FALEIROS, Fabiana Amelio. Lady Incentivo - SEX 2018: an album about thesis, love and money. 2017. 148 f. Thesis (Doctorate in Contemporary Art and Culture) - State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2017.
4- FEDERICI, Silvia. Mulheres e caça às bruxas. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2019.
5- FEDERICI, Silvia. Mulheres e caça às bruxas. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2019. p. 81.
6- CASTRO, Yeda Pessoa. Speak African in Bahia. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2001.
7- Renata Pedreira's public post (renatinha.pedreira) on Facebook - August 1, 2020, at 15:43.
This piece is published in Brazilian Portuguese in the 1st edition of the MATA Magazine, by Plataforma9.
Esse artigo está publicado em português (BR) na 1ª edição da Revista MATA, da Plataforma9.
Fabiana Faleiros
works at the intersection between art and the invention of pedagogies. PhD in Contemporary Art and Culture by UERJ, coordinates the study group Minha Tese Começa Assim, and in 2019 she was a visiting professor at Escuela Incierta, Lugar a Dudas, Cali, Colombia. She participated in the 10 Berlin Biennale and is the author of the book O Pulso Que Cai e as Tecnologias do Toque, Ikrek, São Paulo, 2016 — Proac Prize Book Artist.