All the Rumors Are True

by Nicholas Baer and Maggie Hennefeld

There have been many who have accused me to you for many years now,

and none of their accusations are true.

–Plato, Apology[1]

 

All the rumors are true, yeah /

What ya’ heard, that’s true, yeah

–Lizzo featuring Cardi B, ‘Rumors’[2]

Rumor had it that Socrates was impious towards the Olympian deities. In Plato’s telling, Socrates addressed the malicious rumor in his speech before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BCE: ‘Those who spread that rumor, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers, for their hearers believe that those who study these things do not even believe in the gods.’[3] While Socrates tried to mobilize logos in self-defense, he was ultimately helpless against the onslaught of hearsay. A baseless rumor thus led to the death of the very philosopher who had questioned the false beliefs of his interlocutors, guiding them down the path of truth grounded in logos. Where the ancient Greeks distinguished between episteme (knowledge) and doxa (belief, opinion), the case of Socrates indicates that doxa maintains the upper hand—and this holds no less true in our present era of post-truth politics and virally proliferating misinformation.

How do rumors outwit logos? As Mladen Dolar has recently argued, although rumors circulate anonymously—without an assignable origin or ascertained source—they can gain enormous traction and currency, becoming virtually impossible to combat: ‘Whatever one ascribes to people in rumours will start functioning as their “spectral” quality and no amount of argument can undo this smear… With rumours, the referential function works as if by unconscious magic, affecting things with words by mere naming.’[4] Summoning the magical powers of language, rumors are an unsubstantiated yet uncannily potent form of performative utterance: authorless yet authoritative, trifling yet consequential, fickle yet enduring, unfounded yet steadfast. One may try in vain to refute unjust allegations or, alternatively, seek to undermine their force by satirically affirming that ‘all the rumors are true’.

The articles in this special issue focus on rumors alongside a related but nonsynonymous mode of discourse, gossip. From the Latin rumor (‘noise’), rumors are characterized by the impersonal, widespread transmission of unverified information in situational contexts of ambiguity and potential threat. By contrast, gossip (from the Old English godsibb, ‘godparent, sponsor’) is casual, evaluative talk about individuals that depends on more intimate ties within an inner circle.[5] Concerning an absent third party, gossip establishes a relation among three types of actors (sender, object, receiver) and acts (attribution, communication, perception).[6] Though commonly dismissed as small talk, gossip is an essential form of interpersonal bonding and strategic reputation management, involving normative value judgments, group membership and cohesiveness, and a degree of trust and shared background. For Robin Dunbar, gossip played a fundamental role in the evolution of language, serving as nothing less than ‘the central plank on which human sociality is founded’.[7] 

Examining gossip as a social phenomenon across time and culture, scholars in various disciplines have emphasized its multipurpose and context-dependent qualities. Patricia Meyer Spacks pursues analogies between gossip and literature, tracing the fluid continuum of gossip from the malicious through the frivolous to the serious.[8] Where Kierkegaard and Heidegger disparaged gossip as trivial, inauthentic discourse or idle talk (Gerede), Spacks insists on its positive value in facilitating human connection, self-knowledge, and moral investigation. Karen Adkins argues that gossip leads to knowledge, helping us think about the world via processes of selection and synthesis.[9] While maintaining that gossip can disrupt or even subvert the normal workings of power, serving as a ‘weapon of the weak’ (James C. Scott), Adkins notes a deep inconsistency regarding the recognition and perceived credibility of gossip depending on its mobilization from socially dominant or subaltern positions.[10] A mainstream news outlet’s ‘anonymous sources’, for example, are regarded differently than other concealed or undisclosed voices.

Originating in the oral sphere, rumors and gossip are transmitted and often amplified by historically variable media forms. In Cinema 2 (1985), Gilles Deleuze identified rumor as a ‘cinematographically privileged object’ in early sound films such as Fritz Lang’s M (1931), Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932), and John Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking (1935).[11] Yet across the entire history of cinema, films have visualized, thematized, and participated in the production and propagation of indeterminate speech acts; meanwhile, gossip columns, fan magazines, and tabloids have devoted themselves to news items regarding the stars. For Richard Dyer, the gossip press provided inspiration for the characters, events, and form of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), which introduced the term paparazzo: ‘Not only can the main events be traced to specific publicly circulating stories… there is also commonly a recognition of the involvement of the media in relaying, moulding, even egging on the story.’[12]

While rumors have long implicated networks of communication and interconnectivity, digital technologies intensify their effects through an unprecedented increase in the number of social partners and interactions as well as in the speed, scale, and permanence of information transfer.[13] With a music video that references elements of classical antiquity, Lizzo and Cardi B’s ‘Rumors’ (2021) voices perennial concerns about rumors that tend to accompany the rise of new media, responding to the proliferation of sensationalist, often-slanderous hearsay that enshrouds public figures at the nexus of fama, fame, and defamation. The song comments on a contemporary global mediascape in which rumors are far-reaching and untethered from their local contexts (‘They even post it on blogs overseas / A lie in a language I can’t even read’), feeding an exploitative, profit-driven culture of scandal and outrage.[14]

If the Enlightenment heralded the age of reason, the twenty-first century has seen untruths prevail in the form of misinformation, fake news, and conspiracies that reverberate in online echo chambers. As Dolar notes, ‘The Internet, in its short history, seems to have rapidly run the course from logos (with the initial utopian promise of instant and massive access to information, unparalleled in history, with the enormously facilitated communication, the prospect of emancipation and democratisation) to the shadowy calumnious other side of the big Other, which seems, yet again, to be winning the day.’[15] Moving from tools of knowledge to conduits of rumor, digital media have further threatened the distinction between episteme and doxa that subtends the history of philosophy. Though ostensibly a contradiction in terms, an episteme of doxa, or philosophy of rumors, thus becomes crucial for addressing the acute crises of our time and tracing the broader dialectic of counter-Enlightenment.[16] In the following sections, we introduce the contributions to this issue, situating them within three interrelated bodies of literature: ‘Feminist Whisper Networks’, ‘Queer Fabulations’, and ‘Doxa Goes Viral’.

Feminist Whisper Networks

Rumors and gossip can offer lifelines for forms of knowledge production and exchange that are often delegitimized as ‘idle women’s talk.’ Silvia Federici traces the semantic mutation of gossip in premodern England from a godsibb (godparent, sponsor) to a companion in childbirth, and from a close female friend to a woman engaging in the sort of threatening chatter forcibly outlawed by the patriarchy amid sixteenth-century witch-hunts (which, she argues, cemented the sexual division of labor on the altar of capitalist primitive accumulation).[17] In England, ‘a proclamation was issued in 1547 forbidding women to “meet together to babble and talk” and ordering husbands to “keep their wives in their houses”’.[18] Loose-lipped or rebellious women were punished and publicly humiliated through torture instruments such as the ‘gossip bridle’, which clamped down on the top of the tongue and was often studded with spikes to inflict pain upon the impulse to utterance. 

Disentangling the dangers of rumors and gossip from their critical promise has been an enduring issue in feminist theory and activism. ‘Long before #MeToo’, notes Maria Verena Peters, women ‘who spoke out against sexual violence were pillorized through gossip and stigmatized as gossips in the public sphere’, confining their protest to the laryngitic voice of whisper networks.[19] Informal channels of information passed privately between individuals (often women) to warn against harassers, bullies, and sexual predators, whisper networks have been amplified by social media hashtags to bring the occupational hazard of libidinal power into the public eye.[20] If #MeToo seeks to assert precarious hearsay as credible evidence of endemic abuse (via the injunction ‘Believe women’), powerful institutions waste no time in weaponizing whispers to discredit the righteous protest of workers and students who file complaints about inequity, harassment, and intimidation. As Sara Ahmed attests, ‘Complaints are made even harder because of… informal conversations, gossip, rumors that circulate to pathologize the complainer or anyone deemed the origin of a complaint.’[21]

Yet it is precisely the instability of rumors and gossip that makes them such a tantalizing resource for feminist scholarship. ‘If one is to work theoretically and historically as a feminist’, remarks Irit Rogoff, ‘then one of the tasks is to bring into theory, by which I mean to bring into critical consciousness, that which has always languished outside it, which has remained untheorized for very good reasons’.[22] For Rogoff, gossip lurks in close proximity to the master narratives of history, challenging lofty categories and undoing the distinctions between high and low, serious and trivial. Defying the suspicion toward feminist discourse as mere idle chatter, Rogoff embraces gossip as a form of imaginative testimony that can point to alternative economies and question the ‘false, immutable coherence’ of received historical narratives.[23]

At a time when episteme appears hopelessly inextricable from doxa, gossip serves as a model of postmodern knowledge that troubles historical realism and destabilizes the grand narratives of cultural production. Pamela VanHaitsma emphasizes the rhetorical openness of gossip: its ‘refusal to solidify criteria that close down who may gossip, about whom, and to what ends’.[24] She enacts gossip as a feminist methodology to blow open the cracks in the archive and invest them with illicit meanings while fostering imaginative speculation. ‘Dictionary definitions of the terms rumor, gossip, and scandal point to their narrative unreliability and their shaky epistemological status’, notes Debashree Mukherjee. ‘However, if historicized, these discursive practices offer important clues about cinema as an industrial as well as imaginative form.’[25] Mukherjee traces the sketchy evidence of gendered star scandals to establish women’s status and labor conditions that elude historical documentation in the context of the early Bombay film industry. Similar methods enliven further feminist approaches to the absences and irreducible ambiguities of the archive: from Giuliana Bruno’s ‘inferential walks’ to Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’ to Amelie Hastie’s ‘cupboards of curiosity’ that intermingle fact and fiction, history and memory, in order to recuperate excluded histories of female film authorship.[26]

The first two contributions to this issue address rumors and gossip as pervasive subjects and vital methodological impulses for feminist historiography and critical thought.[27]  In ‘Vintage Furniture: The Significance of the Casting Couch as Industry Gossip and Rumor’, Kate Fortmueller disassembles the euphemistic ‘casting couch’ to understand ‘how Hollywood operates as both a business and an industry of desire’. While women workers have been forced to rely on whisper networks to navigate the treacherous climate of bloated male power, such informal gossip arguably perpetuates the very conditions that necessitate its silencing. Spanning the history of Hollywood, Fortmueller’s essay presents gossip as the rope that draws people in and teaches them how to survive the whiplash of their own celluloid dreams, thereby keeping the system running.

The multiple functions of gossip are a key concern of Bethany E. Qualls’ contribution, ‘Gossip’s Ephemeral Longevity: Power, Circulation, and New Media’. Drawing from contemporary media theory along with recent scholarship in multifarious disciplines, Qualls argues that gossip builds and reveals cultural networks serving a range of purposes—whether celebrity creation, crowdsourced anonymity, or political revolt. Qualls suggests the utility of a transhistorical approach to gossip, one that spans from eighteenth-century periodicals to the #FreeBritney campaign on social media, and from women-led insurrections to Moira Donegan’s ‘Shitty Media Men’, a whisper network that took the form of a Google spreadsheet that crowdsourced anonymous rumors and allegations against, well, ‘shitty media men’ for sexual misconduct. Explaining the contradictory characterizations of gossip as both trivial and dangerous, Qualls writes, ‘gossip becomes a punching bag for information transfer, a space where non-credible and/or important information goes to be contained, but also to escape, be whispered out of turn, or tweeted late at night’. 

Queer Fabulations

Gossip is pivotal to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theorized as the ‘epistemology of the closet’, helping discern ‘what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world’.[28] Yet efforts to establish moving images as legitimate objects of historical study have often foreclosed rumors and gossip as potential sources of knowledge. In The Liveliest Art (1957), Arthur Knight sought ‘to forgo much of the chatty gossip about personalities or the behind-the-camera maneuverings that so often pass for film history’.[29] Such suspicion of unsubstantiated information was radicalized by the ‘historical turn’ in cinema studies in the 1980s, as the discipline appealed to methods and ideals of primary source research, rigorous documentation, and precise, factual representation. Where New Film History aspired to what Thomas Elsaesser characterized as ‘scientific or empirical standards of exactitude and knowledge’,[30] more recent work has embraced approaches or materials often deemed dubious, speculative, uncertain, or otherwise unreliable.[31]

Questioning the objectivist investments of New Film History, queer cinema and media scholarship has looked to rumors and gossip as means of countering the historical erasure of nonnormative identities and meanings. In Twilight of the Idols (2011), Mark Lynn Anderson critiques biographies of silent film star Rudolph Valentino that seek the authoritative ‘truth’ of the individual on the basis of irrefutable evidence. Anderson emphasizes the crucial role of gossip and innuendo in the mass-cultural reception of Valentino, whose deviant and indeterminate sexual identity served as a site of projection and conjecture. Drawing from Sedgwick, Anderson writes, ‘Gossip is thus often an act of resistance, the creation of an alternative space from which to pose questions about identity, questions that sometimes challenge both social propriety and scientific rigor as they are defined by the hegemonic order.’[32]

A vital resource for the formation of queer identities, intimacies, and histories, gossip is characterized by its subcultural circulation, illicit epistemology, and potential for pleasurable, fabulative world-making.[33] In Between You and Me (2005), Gavin Butt highlights the importance of gossip in the midcentury New York art world along with retrospective chronicles of the period, aiming to inaugurate a queer turn in art historiography that eschews positivist methods of inquiry.[34] Similarly, Marc Siegel criticizes scholars who question the veracity of drag artist Vaginal Davis’s ‘My Favorite Dead Artist’, a gossip-filled account of her encounters with Andy Warhol. Adopting a Deleuzian approach to gossip ‘as fabulous, as a form of fabulation’,[35] Siegel theorizes what he terms ‘gossip-images’, involving the ‘dynamic process of speculating about and embellishing Hollywood star images in queer counterpublics’.[36]

Recent books within Black queer and trans studies have positioned rumors and gossip at the nexus of regulation and resistance, visibility and concealment. In Nobody Is Supposed to Know (2014), C. Riley Snorton considers how rumors and gossip factor into the intricate entanglements of Blackness, queerness, and the public sphere[37]. Analyzing narratives of ‘the down low’ via gossip blogs devoted to Black celebrities, Snorton demonstrates how speculation about gender and sexual identity contributes to the panoptical surveillance and queer figuration of racialized bodies. Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations (2019) focuses on Black queer and trans subjects as they perform for and against the recording apparatus. Examining moments when Black subversions of gender and sexual norms resist an external gaze, Nyong’o offers a ‘critical and fabulative archiving of a world that was… meant to be kept outside or below representation’.[38]

Three of the essays in this issue explore the role of rumors and gossip in the production and dissemination of queer historical knowledge. Extending arguments from his Twilight of the Idols, Mark Lynn Anderson’s ‘Anger Management, or the Dream of a Falsifiable Film-Historical Past’ mounts a spirited defense of a notoriously scandalous work of film historiography: underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (originally published in French in 1959), filled with sordid and salacious gossip about classic Hollywood stars. Drawing attention to the book’s affective appeal to queer audiences, Anderson polemicizes against film historians, journalists, and podcasters who have repeatedly tried to correct its errors and undocumented claims: ‘It is this de-queering of the film historical past that I see widely indulged by various projects of film history that seek to set the record straight through appeals to archival research and factual rigor.’

Mal Ahern’s ‘The Machine that Makes Gossip: Andy Warhol’s Screen Test of Marcel Duchamp’ builds on the work of Butt and Siegel, arguing that Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests ‘actively seek expansion and embellishment in discourse’. Focusing on Warhol’s 1966 shoot of Marcel Duchamp, Ahern shows how the production circumstances and formal characteristics of the Screen Tests generated and sustained endless speculation. In ‘Against the Tyranny of the Fact: Autofabulation as a Queer Strategy of Resistance’, Benoît Loiseau considers the work of artist, filmmaker, and AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz, analyzing his series of anecdotal monologues titled Some Styles of Masculinity (2017–ongoing). For Loiseau, Bordowitz’s performance practice employs autofabulation as a queer mode of resistance, one that troubles the status of evidence and ‘counters the authoritative truth-claim of conventional fact-based discourses’.

Doxa Goes Viral 

 If ‘all the rumors are true’, is all truth then abandoned to the sinkhole of rumor? In the contemporary mediascape, it might appear foolhardy to remain invested in the intellectual utility and critical potential of rumors, gossip, and other forms of doxa. Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture (2006) emphasized the internet’s hopeful convergence between invigorating gossip and democratic consensus formation; ‘gossip builds common ground between participants’, he observed with reference to American Idol’s online fan communities.[39] Yet that optimism regarding digitized gossip networks now seems untenable as misinformation and toxic hate speech pervade newsfeeds and idle talk is siloed into algorithmically confined echo chambers.

The ‘dark side’ of rumors and gossip metastasizes in the digital age, as Daniel J. Solove warns in The Future of Reputation (2007). ‘As social reputation-shaping practices such as gossip and shaming migrate to the Internet, they are being transformed in significant ways. Information that was once scattered, forgettable, and localized is becoming permanent and searchable.’[40] Unsubstantiated factoids run roughshod over social media, Reddit, Discord, 4chan, 8chan, and any conceivable venue for virtual communication. Against the breakneck speed and inescapable longevity of virally proliferating news stories, Alexandra Juhasz defends a slowness that allows requisite time for inquiry, verification, reflection, and action. As she counsels in ‘#100hardtruths-#fakenews’, ‘Given the internet’s fundamentally unhealthy imbrication of views, brand, market and celebrity, we must demand and produce sustaining environments that counter acceleration.’[41] 

Recent feminist scholarship has taken up the concern with ‘views, brand, market and celebrity’, viewing gossip as yet another arena for neoliberal evaluation and self-regulation. Julie A. Wilson diagnoses celebrity gossip’s incitement to ‘star testing’ as a ‘highly diffused and distinctly postfeminist technique of neoliberal governmentality’.[42] What motivated Rebel Wilson’s weight loss? How does Meghan Markle achieve her long lashes? Did Ali Wong’s last stand-up special cause her divorce? Was Amber Heard using cocaine on the witness stand? These are the kinds of burning questions that monetize gossip as clickbait across the pervasive tabloid column that is the internet. As Erin A. Meyers argues in Dishing Dirt in the Digital Age (2013), ‘celebrity gossip is not just media for women, but also media about women and the ways women, their bodies, sexuality and gender roles are represented and policed (often by other women) through gossip’.[43] It would seem the patriarchy no longer requires oral torture instruments to inhibit the freedom and flourishing of women.

Rumors have been further instrumental to the persistence of white supremacy in the twenty-first century. Extending the concerns of her foundational studies I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1993) and Whispers on the Color Line (with Gary Alan Fine, 2001), Patricia A. Turner examines the racist rumors that circulated about former President Barack Obama during his candidacies and two terms in office, most notoriously the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory promoted by Donald Trump on various platforms. In Turner’s analysis, the media and political establishment devoted insufficient effort to discrediting such spurious and vitriolic anti-Obama lore, opening the floodgates for the deluge of fake news in 2016 and beyond: ‘The mainstream media and established political authorities ignored, tolerated, and/or dismissed rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories that surfaced about Barack Obama, and this inattention contributed to the ease with which authentically “fake news” is considered plausible or legitimate.’[44] 

The final contributions to this issue address the ambiguity and political promiscuity of rumors and gossip in the post-truth era. Renée Pastel and Michael Dalebout analyze Q: Into the Storm (2021) as an investigative docuseries and alternative reality game. Under the guise of entering and intervening into the rumor-filled world of QAnon, the series clouds the distinction between documentary truth and gamified truth-to-come, ultimately fostering ‘the same conditions that induce conspiratorial thinking in the first place’. From the shadowy message boards of QAnon to the behemoth of right-wing political media, Scott Krzych considers the incoherent rhetoric of colorblind racism (‘I’m not a racist… but’), whereby conservatives invalidate demands for racial justice by dismissing incontrovertible evidence of anti-Black violence as mere hearsay. Where Catherine Malabou views the plasticity of the brain as cause for hope, Krzych argues that her philosophy ‘aptly describes the ability of forces on the political Right to resist calls for change’.

Hope for change comes, however, via Michelle Cho’s article, ‘Anonymous, QAnon, Tik-tok Teens, K-pop Fans’, which explores the fabled political organizing of K-pop fans who deploy social media in coalition with Black Lives Matter and other progressive movements. Often likened to Anonymous, K-pop fans weaponize rumor-mongering digital platforms for mass interventions and forms of collective solidarity. As Cho suggests, ‘the insecure knowledge mobilized by rumor, as well as the mysteries of scale and identity that K-pop fandom activates as an unruly mass phenomenon, work in favor of fan empowerment’. Rumor-based digital activism responds to acute political crises, revealing an alternative to the status quo of corporate profiteering and neoliberal self-entrepreneurship.

Taken together, the eight essays in this issue reassess rumors and gossip across the vast landscape of contemporary media. If the crisis of truth and logos is as old as philosophy, one might ask, then what good will be a philosophy of rumors to mitigate the multiplying catastrophes of our present conjuncture? This is one of the questions that animates our concluding roundtable discussion with Mladen Dolar, Richard Dyer, Alexandra Juhasz, Tavia Nyong’o, Marc Siegel, and Patricia Turner. Nyong’o turns to the divisive satire Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021), reading it as an allegory not only about climate change, but also about the circulation of rumors: ‘teenage burnouts… actually turn out to know something that the “non-duped” astronomer won’t permit herself to believe: the ultra-wealthy really do plan to survive the catastrophe they are letting coalesce around us all’. While staging the uphill battle of scientific knowledge against unfounded opinion, or episteme against doxa, Don’t Look Up ultimately affirms that the burnout rumor is true.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Annie van den Oever and Malte Hagener for making this issue possible; the entire NECSUS editorial board for expertly guiding it toward publication; Matthew Tchepikova-Treon for invaluable research assistance; Kartik Nair for incisive comments on this introduction; all of the peer reviewers for their thoughtful and generative feedback on the issue’s essays; and, of course, our nine contributors and six roundtable panelists for their extraordinary work.

Authors

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of Media, Arts & Society in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. He is author of the forthcoming monograph, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism, and co-editor of two volumes: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933 (University of California Press, 2016) and Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019). During the 2021-22 academic year he is Junior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study in Greifswald.

Maggie Hennefeld is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and McKnight Presidential Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018), co-editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press), co-editor of two volumes: Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke University Press, 2020), and co-curator of a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set, Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022).

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Wilson, J.A. ‘Star testing: The emerging politics of celebrity gossip’, The Velvet Light Trap, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2010: 25–38.

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[1] Plato 1997, p. 19. 

[2] Lizzo featuring Cardi B, ‘Rumors’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P9XUrniiK4 

[3] Plato 1997, p. 19.

[4] Dolar 2021, p. 147.

[5] See DiFonzo and Bordia 2007. Also see: Rosnow and Fine 1976; Warner 2002, pp. 78–79; Foster 2004; Rosnow and Foster: https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/04/gossip; Stewart (Strathern) and Strathern 2020: https://anthrobookforum.americananthro.org/index.php/2020/02/20/gossip-a-thing-humans-do/); Vernon: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0238.xml. See also recent special issues: Diogenes: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/dio/54/1; Martin 2014: https://academic.oup.com/fmls/issue/50/2; Monot and Zappe 2020: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/16351

[6] Giardini and Wittek 2019, p. 1.

[7] Dunbar 2004, p. 109; see also Dunbar 1996.

[8]  Spacks 1985.

[9] Adkins 2017.

[10] Scott 1985.

[11] Deleuze 1989, p. 227.

[12] Dyer 2018, p. 18; see also: Dyer 1998.

[13] See Horodowich 2021.

[14] Lizzo featuring Cardi B, ‘Rumors’.

[15] Dolar 2021, p. 159.

[16] See also: Jay 2020.

[17] Federici 2018.

[18] Wright, L.B. Middle-class culture in Elizabethan England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963, p. 467; quoted in Federici 2018, p. 40.

[19] Peters 2020: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.16587

[20] ‘Gossip is where the private, deviant and forbidden circulates, true or not… out of sight from the public’, wrote Manohla Dargis in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein verdict: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/movies/weinstein-jail.html

[21] Ahmed 2021, p. 127.

[22] Rogoff 1996, pp. 6-7.

[23] Rogoff 1996, p. 7.

[24] VanHaitsma 2016.

[25] Mukherjee 2015, p. 30.

[26] Bruno 1993; Hartman 2008; Hastie 2007.

[27] See also: Anselmo 2021; Dang 2017; Desjardins 2015; Fusco 2019.

[28] Sedgwick 1990, p. 23.

[29] Knight 1957, p. 5.

[30] Elsaesser 1986, p. 247.

[31] On the recent turn to rumors and gossip in historiography, see also: Ghosh 2008; Jobs 2014; Jobs 2021.

[32] Anderson 2011, p. 97.

[33] See, e.g., Crimp 1992, p. 13: ‘The most fundamental need gossip has served for queers is that of the construction—and reconstruction—of our identities’. Also see: Abelove 2003; Bennett 2018.

[34] Butt 2005.

[35] Siegel 2008, p. 156.

[36] Siegel 2016, p. 196.

[37] Snorton 2014, pp. 121-146.

[38] Nyong’o 2019, p. 3.

[39] Jenkins 2006, p. 84.

[40] Solove 2007, p. 4.

[41] Juhasz: https://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/100hardtruths-fakenews/33-speed-matters-there-is-safety-in-the-slow

[42] Wilson 2010, p. 33.

[43] Meyers 2013, p. 11.

[44] Turner 2018, p. 425; see also Turner 2022.