Alma Ruby Fjelrad Palmer

This thesis investigates the dynamics of gossip as both a tool for reinforcing trust and a mechanism for undermining it. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks, it reframes gossip not as idle talk, but as a form of power. The project traces gossip’s evolutionary roots as a tool for survival, its historical marginalisation, particularly through its gendered associations, before turning to its reclamation by feminist theorists as a mode of relational knowledge and resistance. Special focus is given to the consequences of (mis)information and the criteria by which trust is negotiated within environments. These ideas are examined through a close analysis of The Traitors UK, where gossip functions simultaneously as a strategy and a threat. Players use it to build alliances, manipulate perception, and destabilise authority in an environment structured by uncertainty. A sound installation extends this analysis by making the unstable, relational nature of gossip audible through layered, distorted, and spatially fragmented voices. The work underscores the thesis’s central claim: gossip’s power lies less in what is said, but in how it is said, where, and to whom.