“Aiiin, Mona, o babado é forte!”: quando a fofoca joga com a verdade, interroga as amizades e produz sexualidades

Abstract

Gossip is a form of narrative that establishes a connection between subjects and the world. It is part of people's everyday lives and informs the network of values, whether hegemonic or not. Gossip as a phenomenon also serves an educative purpose when children participate in daily life, learning with it the moral norms of their groups. Despite being historically reprimanded for being an unofficial narrative, gossip lives on the margins of the norm and institutional discourse, escaping through the tangents and weaving through school corridors, rooms, yards, and gaps. This master's thesis research takes place at a public school in Rio de Janeiro, affiliated with the postgraduate program, focusing on the elementary level students. In this present work, I present the research findings from a series of five workshops with a fourth-grade class, involving children aged nine to ten as participants. The workshops debated intersubjective relationships, with gossip emerging on the field as a research object and analytical material from the first meeting. Questioning the meaning of gossip among children, I aim to reflect on its effects on the process of children's subjectivation. The main theoretical-methodological dialogues involve authors from intersectional feminisms, critical childhood studies, decolonial studies, post-structuralism, and queer theories rooted in the idea of situated knowledge production. The research-intervention and field diary also constitute the methodological framework. From Foucault, gossip is taken as a playful device that accesses and produces opinions, confessions, pleasures, fantasies, excitability games, norms, beliefs, hegemonic values, but also their questioning, inversions and ruptures. Gossip has proven to be a channel through which children explore their sexualities, play with the notion of truth, power, and exchange. It is also a significant element in the formation of affectionate and friendly relationships, in which it operates in an ambivalent way in the approaching and distancing dynamics between them, for being sometimes enjoyed as entertainment, and other times seen as dangerous. To conclude, the immersion of children in social networks is considered as a backdrop for the intense enunciation of gossip, interconnected with other themes.