Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-10T16:06:10.575Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Othering in gossip: “you go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like…”:

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2005

ADAM JAWORSKI  and
JUSTINE COUPLAND
ADAM JAWORSKI
Affiliation:
Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, P.O. Box 94, Cardiff CF10 3XB, Wales, UK, [email protected]
JUSTINE COUPLAND
Affiliation:
Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, P.O. Box 94, Cardiff CF10 3XB, Wales, UK, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It has been claimed that gossip allows participants to negotiate aspects of group membership, and the inclusion and exclusion of others, by working out shared values. This article examines instances of gossipy storytelling among young friends during which participants negotiate self- and other-identities in particular ways. Participants are found to share judgments not only about others' behavior but also about their own behavior through particular processes of othering. A range of discursive strategies place the characters in gossip-stories (even in the category called “self-gossip”) in marginalized, liminal, or uncertain social spaces. In the gossipy talk episodes examined, social “transgression” might be oriented to as a serious matter and thus pejorated, or oriented to in a playful key and thus celebrated. This ambiguity – “Do we disapprove or approve, of this ‘bad’ behavior?” – means that in negotiating the identity status of “gossipees” liminality is constant. It is argued that othering, as an emergent category, along with the particular discursive strategies that achieve it, is an aspect of gossip that deserves further attention.We thank Jane Hill, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Nik Coupland for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. To clarify the title, from ex.(1), you can pull is British English; in American English perhaps the closest expression to pull is get with, proactively set up a link with someone, probably a sexual one, probably only for one evening or night.

Keywords

Gossipstoriesself- and other-identitiesotheringliminality
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 34 , Issue 5 , November 2005 , pp. 667 - 694
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah (1968). Men in dark times. London: Jonathan Cape.
Austin, J. L. (1961). A plea for excuses. In his Philosophical papers, 123–152. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara (1975). Why frogs are good to think and dirt is good to reflect on. Soundings 58:167–181.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Trans. V. W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Basso, Keith H. (1972). “To give up on words”: Silence in Western Apache culture. In Pier P. Giglioli (ed.), Language and social context, 67–86. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bauman, Richard (2001 [1975]). Verbal art as performance. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 165–188. Oxford: Blackwell.
Besnier, Niko (1989). Information withholding as a manipulative and collusive strategy in Nukulaelae gossip. Language in Society 18:315–41.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi (1994). The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism. In The location of culture, 66–84. London: Routledge.
Blommaert, Jan, & Verschueren, Jef (1998). Debating diversity: Analysing the discourse of tolerance. London: Routledge.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (2000). Gossipy events at family dinners: Negotiating sociability, presence and the moral order. In Justine Coupland (ed.), Small talk, 213–40. London: Pearson Education.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond & Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity.
Brenneis, Donald (1992). Gossip. In Richard Bauman (ed.), Folklore, cultural performances, and popular entertainments, 150–53. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bucholtz, Mary, & Hall, Kira (2004a). Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33: 469–515.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary, & Hall, Kira (2004b). Language and identity. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 367–94. Oxford: Blackwell.
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that matter. London: Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah (1997). Performing gender identity: Young men's talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In Sally Johnson & Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (eds.), Language and masculinity, 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coates, Jennifer (1989). Gossip revisited: An analysis of all-female discourse. In Jennifer Coates & Deborah Cameron (eds.), Women in their speech communities: New perspectives on language and sex, 94–122. London: Longman.
Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women talk: Conversation between women friends. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coates, Jennifer (1999). Women behaving badly: Female speakers backstage. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:65–80.Google Scholar
Coates, Jennifer (2000). Small talk and subversion: Female speakers backstage. In Justine Coupland (ed.), Small talk, 241–63. London: Pearson Education.
Coates, Jennifer (2003). Men talk: Stories in the making of masculinities. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRef
Clark, Herbert H., & Van Der Wege, Mija (2001). Imagination in discourse. In Deborah Schiffrin et al. (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis, 772–86. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coupland, Justine (2000). Introduction: Sociolinguistic perspectives on small talk. In Justine Coupland (ed.), Small talk, 1–25. London: Pearson Education.CrossRef
Coupland, Justine, & Jaworski, Adam (2003). Transgression and intimacy in recreational talk narratives. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36:85–106.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas (1999). “Other” representation. In Jef Verschueren et al. (eds.), Handbook of pragmatics 1999, 1–24. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Coupland, Nikolas (2001). Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30:345–75.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas (2004) Stylised deception. In Adam Jaworski et al. (eds.), Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives, 249–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Derrida, Jacques (1981). Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Douglas, Mary (1966). Purity and danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.CrossRef
Dowling, Tim (2001). Psssssst…: A US survey says men gossip more than women. Surely not, says Tim Dowling. The Guardian (G2), 18 June 2001, 9.
Dunbar, Robin (1992). Why gossip is good for you? New Scientist, 21 November 1992, 28–31.
Eggins, Suzanne, & Slade, Diana (1997). Analysing casual conversation. London: Cassell.
Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity.
Fine, G. A. (1985). Rumours and gossiping. In Teun van Dijk (ed.), Handbook of discourse analysis, vol. 3, Discourse and dialogue, 223–37. London: Academic Press.
Garrett, Peter; Coupland, Nikolas; & Williams, Angie (2003). Researching language attitudes: Dialect, community and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Gluckmann, Max (1963). Gossip and scandal. Current Anthropology 4:307–16.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1971). The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin.
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Guendouzi, Jackie (2001). “You think we're always bitching”: The functions of cooperativity and competition in women's gossip. Discourse Studies 3:29–51.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart (1993). Cultural identity in question. In Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Modernity and its futures, 273–313. Cambridge: Polity.
Hall, Stuart (1996). Introduction: Who needs “identity”? In Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of cultural identity, 1–17. London: Sage.
Hall, Stuart (1997). The spectacle of the “other”. In Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices, 223–79. London: Sage & Open University Press.
Haviland, John B. (1977). Gossip, reputation, and knowledge in Zinacantan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heritage, John (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, 299–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jaworski, Adam (1993). The power of silence: Social and pragmatic perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Johnson, Sally, & Finlay, Frank (1996). Do men gossip? An analysis of football talk on television. In Sally Johnson & Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (eds.), Language and masculinity, 130–43. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jones, Deborah (1980). Gossip: Notes on women's oral culture. In Cheris Kramarae (ed.), The words and voices of women and men, 193–98. Oxford: Pergamon.CrossRef
Laclau, Ernesto (1990). New reflections on the revolution of our time. London: Verso.
Leach, Edmund R. (1964). Anthropological aspects of language: Animal categories and verbal abuse. In Eric H. Lenneberg (ed.), New directions in the study of language, 23–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leach, Edmund R. (ed.) (1969). Genesis as myth and other essays. London: Jonathan Cape.
Leach, Edmund R. (1976). Culture and communication: The logic by which symbols are connected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Leach, Edmund R. (1977). Custom, law, and terrorist violence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Leach, Edmund R. (1982). Social anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neuman, Yair; Bekerman, Zvi; & Kaplan, Avi (2002). Rhetoric as the contextual manipulation of self and nonself. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35:93–112.Google Scholar
Pilkington, Jane (1992). “Don't try to make out that I'm nice” The different strategies women and men use when gossiping. Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics 5:37–60. Repr. in Jennifer Coates (ed.), Language and gender: A reader, 254–69. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.
Riggins, Stephen Harold (1997a). The rhetoric of othering. In Stephen Harold Riggins (ed.), The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse, 1–30. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Riggins, Stephen Harold (ed.) (1997b). The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rosnow, Ralph L. (1977). Gossip and marketplace psychology. Journal of Communication 27:158–63.Google Scholar
Rysman, Alexander, R. (1977). Gossip and occupational ideology. Journal of Communication 26:64–68.Google Scholar
Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Sherzer, Joel. 2002. Speech play, andverbal art. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schneider, Klaus (1987). Topic selection in phatic communion. Multilingua 6:247–56.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg (1971). The stranger. In Donal N. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel on individuality and social forms, 141–49. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Statman, Daniel (1994). Gossip, “bad tongue” and morality [in Hebrew]. Iyunim Bexinux 43:399–415.Google Scholar
Suls, Jerry M. (1977). Gossip as social comparison. Journal of Communication 27:164–68.Google Scholar
Tajfel, Henri, & Turner, John C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In William G. Austin & Stephen Worchel (eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations, 33–47. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Thurlow, Crispin (2001). Naming the “outsider within”: Homophobic pejoratives and the verbal abuse of lesbian, gay and bisexual high-school pupils. Journal of Adolescence 24:25–38.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine.
Turner, Victor (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Van Gennep, Arnold (1960 [1909]). The rites of passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom & Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Valentine, James (1998). Naming the other: Power, politeness and the inflation of euphemisms. Sociological Research Online 3/4: 〈http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/3/4/7.html〉CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yerkovich, Sally M. (1977). Gossiping as a way of speaking. Journal of Communication 27:192–96.Google Scholar