Gossip and Oral History

Performativity and Writing the History of Women’s Community

Sinclair, Jeanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9823-7235 (2025) Gossip and Oral History. In: Contemporary Women's Writing Association Conference 2025, 17-20 June 2025, Falmouth University. (Unpublished)

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Abstract / Summary

How do multiple narratives of women’s oral histories author the history of place? This paper draws on gossip in oral histories from the St Ives Archive to explore the ways in which the archive writes narratives of place through women’s voices that explode existing patriarchal histories of the postwar creative community in St Ives.
The collection of women’s interviews in the oral history archive form a discrete community, in and of itself, as well as being a representation of a community. The interviews in the archive within this ‘archived community’ interact to create multiplicitous and multivalent narratives of place to amplify women’s voices and articulate their experiences.
Oral histories are already an intimate way of sharing life stories, but also one in which the participants are aware not only that what they say will be a matter of public record, but will create a legacy. Often, community oral history projects often have another dimension of intimacy. When the interviewer and the interviewee have known each other and lived in the same town for decades, they both bring that shared knowledge of community and place to the the performance. As part of that conversation, they may also discuss a third party, which can be defined as gossip. Listening to gossip in oral histories reveals hidden narratives, and disrupts and destabilises existing patriarchal historiographies of St Ives. As Rogoff (1996) suggests, gossip is a powerful tool that can unearth hidden and alternative narratives of queer and feminine modernisms and modernities. This paper explores how gossip works as a collaborative tool to write the history of community, revealing feminist and queer narratives that would otherwise remain hidden.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	gossip, oral history, feminism, historiography, queer methods, queer history
Subjects:	Art History & Theory History, Geography & Environment History, Geography & Environment > Heritage Studies
Department:	Falmouth School of Art
Depositing User:	Jeanie Sinclair
Date Deposited:	01 Jul 2025 15:49
Last Modified:	01 Jul 2025 15:49
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6084

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