“You Don’t Want to Be One of Those stories” Gossip and Shame as Instruments of Social Control in Small Communities

ABSTRACT

Small, tight-knit communities often have the image of being places that are full of gossip and where everybody knows each other’s business. This closeness can be claustrophobic for individuals who might not want to live by the accepted social norms of the community. Gossip and rumours can be used to keep such individuals in their place by enforcing social norms through social control. Shaming is crucial to this form of social control, where certain behaviour is punished and shamed through the spread of gossip. Shaming is gendered and is used more harshly against women than against men, particularly in regard to women’s behaviour in public and their sexual activity. This paper examines how gossip and shame are a part of gendered social control in small villages/towns in Iceland, and how it affects young women’s lives. The discussion here is based on interviews about gossip with young Icelandic women who either live in or come from small fishing villages. The main themes that were constructed from the analysis were the social control of women through shaming, reputation, and slut-shaming. The analysis shows that slut-shaming and the fear of shame control women’s behaviour and sexual activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social control
• gossip
• shame
• women
• small communities

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the contributions made to this project by our participants in the study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Icelandic Equality Fund under Grant [190139-0661] and the Icelandic Research Fund under Grant [229048-051].

Notes on contributors

Gréta Bergrún Jóhannesdóttir

Greta Bergrun Johannesdottir is a PhD researcher in Sociology at the University of Akureyri in Iceland. Her doctoral project focuses on rural areas, migration and gender. She holds a MA in Gender Studies from Lund University in Sweden and a BA in Media Studies from the University of Akureyri.

Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir

Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. Her main research interests are in the areas of mobility, integration processes, transnational connections, gender, language, and nationality. She has conducted research on gender in Icelandic fishing communities. In the last two decades her research has focused mostly on diverse groups of migrants in Iceland and has published widely on immigration issues including on labour-market participation of migrants and position of refugees. Currently she is a co-coordinator of a three-years research project on migration into rural areas in differ parts of Iceland.