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We've all done it. Shared a rumour, whispered a secret or discussed someone who's not in the room. But gossip is more than idle chatter. Its tangled history reveals how communities form, how reputations are made and broken, and how knowledge travels through society.
Dr Stacy Gillis is a literary scholar at Newcastle University with a particular interest in the stories people tell, share and circulate. In this blog, she explores the surprisingly complex world of gossip, revealing how something often dismissed as trivial can help us understand culture, connection and social change.
Contents:
- What a gossip!
- Taking idle talk seriously
- We are storytelling creatures
- Who gets called a gossip?
- Gossip as protection
- Reputations, bodies, and stories
- Join the conversation
- Interested in submitting to the conference?
What a gossip!
Few words carry as much baggage as ‘gossip’. Call someone a gossip and you accuse them of being indiscreet, idle, even malicious. Yet admit to a good gossip with a friend, and you describe an act of intimate connection.
That doubleness is the starting point for a new multidisciplinary conference on gossip. One is a gossip, and one gossips: the noun and the verb pull in different directions. Gossip is disruptive and anti-social, but it’s also how communities hold together. It spreads knowledge and misinformation alike. It shores up power, and undermines it.
Rather than settle the question, the conference asks what we learn by taking gossip seriously, across history, cultures and disciplines.
Taking idle talk seriously
Gossip is ancient. It appears in carvings on Old Kingdom Egyptian tombs and in the teahouses of Tang dynasty China, in the corridors of Versailles and, today, in group chats and Snapchat streaks. Scholars have long been drawn to it, even if they have sometimes been embarrassed to admit it.
The anthropologist Max Gluckman argued in ‘Gossip and Scandal (1963) that gossip is central to a group's unity: it marks who belongs and reaffirms what the group values. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, in ‘Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language’ (1996), proposed that language evolved from primate social grooming, as a more efficient way of maintaining bonds in large groups. For Dunbar, gossip is not a corruption of speech; it is part of why we speak at all.
Patricia Meyer Spacks's ‘Gossip’ (1985) remains the touchstone, however, for those working on gossip. Spacks distinguished malicious gossip from what she called ‘serious gossip’: intimate talk through which people build solidarity and make sense of their lives. She moved the debate away from moral judgement towards understanding what gossip does.
We are storytelling creatures
At its heart, gossip is a form of storytelling. Every piece of gossip has characters, conflict, motives, and consequences. We want to know who did what, whether it is true, and what might happen next.
This helps explain why gossip appears everywhere in our culture, from medieval ballads and Jane Austen novels to celebrity magazines and social media feeds. The line between gossip, entertainment and narrative is often thinner than we might think.
Seen this way, gossip is not simply a social habit. It is one of the ways humans make sense of the world around them. Through gossip, we share information, test ideas, pass judgement, build relationships, and create stories about ourselves and others.
One reason gossip fascinates researchers is that it appears to satisfy a deeply human need. Studies suggest that a significant proportion of everyday conversation centres on other people: what they have done, who they know, whether their behaviour is admirable, shocking, admirable, or simply surprising. As Dunbar argues, talking about other people plays a central role in maintaining relationships and social bonds.
Part of gossip's appeal also lies in curiosity. Humans are intensely social creatures, and understanding other people's relationships, motivations and reputations helps us navigate the world. Gossip can teach us what a community values, what behaviour it rewards, and what behaviour it condemns.
There is also pleasure in shared knowledge. Being "in the know" can create a sense of belonging. A whispered confidence, a story exchanged over coffee, or a message shared in a group chat can strengthen social bonds and foster trust. This may help explain why gossip feels so contagious: hearing a compelling story often creates an urge to pass it on.
Who gets called a gossip?
The history of the word gossip is revealing.
‘Gossip’ comes from the Old English ‘godsibb’, meaning a godparent: someone spiritually related to the family. In early modern England, it came to mean a woman's close companions at childbirth; in ‘Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women’ (2018), Silvia Federici traces how that bond of female friendship was recast as idle, dangerous chatter. The shift coincided with growing efforts to keep women at home and control their speech.
The gossip has long been imagined as a woman: the village busybody, the nagging scold, the chattering wife. In sixteenth and seventeenth century England and Scotland, women accused of being scolds could be locked into the scold's bridle, an iron frame with a bit that held the tongue down. Tellingly, it was also known as the gossip's bridle. Few objects make the link between gossip, gender and power so brutally plain.
But men gossip too. They just do not call it that. Locker-room talk, ’banter‘, the quiet word in the club or the boardroom: these are gossip economies by other names. The old boys' network trades in reputation, inside knowledge, and judgements of character, exactly as gossip does. What changes is the label, and with it the status. Asking why some talk is dismissed as gossip while other talk counts as networking tells us a great deal about whose speech is valued.
Gossip as protection
If gossip has been used to discipline the marginalised, it has also been one of their best defences. Where official channels fail, or are actively hostile, people rely on informal knowledge passed quietly from one person to the next.
The ’whisper network‘ is the clearest recent example. For decades, women in workplaces, universities, and creative industries warned one another about predatory men. The #MeToo movement made some of these networks visible. ‘Whisper networks’ suddenly became public testimony on social media. While these platforms enable many women feel more able to speak out yet, they may also make them subject to backlash and legal risk.
Queer communities have similar histories. When being openly gay could cost you your job, your family, or your liberty, knowing who was safe, which bars were welcoming, and which streets to avoid depended on talk.
In this sense, gossip helps form what scholars call counterpublics: spaces where people outside the mainstream build shared knowledge and identity on their own terms.
Reputations, bodies, and stories
The protective power of gossip has a darker twin. The same talk that warns can also wound.
Gossip has policed sexuality and gender nonconformity for centuries, from parish whispers about an unmarried pregnancy to tabloid outings of public figures. Reputation, once lost to rumour, is hard to recover, and the cost has rarely fallen evenly.
Gossip is also one of storytelling's great engines. Novels from Jane Austen onwards turn on who knows what about whom. Television thrives on it, from soap operas to Gossip Girl. In horror film and television, rumour often comes before the monster: the local legend, the warning nobody heeds – think of Widow’s Bay.
These stories keep returning to the same question. Who is believed, and who is waved away as "just gossip"? That question matters as much off the page as on it.
Join the conversation
Because gossip cuts across so many fields, the upcoming conference welcomes work from history, gender and race studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, literature, geography, medicine, media and communication, film, business, and beyond. Possible themes include gossip in oral, manuscript, print, visual, and digital forms; identity politics; epistemology; law and power; genre and narrative; management structures; and the semantics and phenomenology of gossip itself.
The event is designed to be sociable. Alongside traditional papers and panels, it invites roundtables, workshops and critical-creative sessions. A participatory session that enacts gossip, perhaps a facilitated "spill the tea" on academic culture itself, would be very much in the spirit of things. There will also be dedicated time for co-writing, building networks and developing funding applications. Gossipy connections are actively encouraged.
For postgraduate and early-career researchers there is a particular opportunity: those whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to apply for one of several funded keynote spots, a chance to set the terms of the conversation rather than simply join it.
Interested in submitting to the conference?
Email a 300-word abstract, with 5–6 keywords, as a Word file to gossip.conference@ncl.ac.uk by 15 December 2026.
The conference is organised by Abi Hockaday, Kirsten MacLeod, and myself in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. Please send any questions to our dedicated email address.
You might also like…
- are you a researcher, interested in the upcoming gossip conference? Find out more
- discover more about the blog author and conference lead, Dr Stacy Gillis, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics
Interested in more recent blogs from the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics?
- read the blog: Night and Day – bringing Virginia Woolf to the North East
- read the blog: Complicity, and what fiction can tell us about it
- read the blog: The true crime stories that inspired Shakespeare
