Talk Me Home: Visibility in Shared Narrative

Cultural inclusion requires locations in which people can ‘discursively’ gather
and reside. One method of creating a lesbian-specific location is through the
reiterations and repetitions of narratives. Narrative structure is an effective
heuristic in what could be called a naturalisation process. Using a well-known
lesbian gossip column this paper demonstrates that a sense of cultural groupmemory
is produced and shared through the narrative of gossip. The degree of
assumed knowledge subsequently attained is textually inscribed in the
trajectory of gossip over time. In this gossip column, celebrities, through their
ongoing coming-out processes, are participants in the naturalisation process,
informing and normalising a historical background for lesbian community.
Inclusion operates through this narrativisation to produce a cultural memory
that becomes an assumed aspect of social interactions. Visibility is the
predominant experiential choice of the writer in all of the individual recount
segments around which the narrative structures of gossip are built. In this way,
the intimate details of a celebrity’s ‘visibility’ process become the basis of the
‘unfolding intimacies’ of this social group’s ‘main characters’ (Dunbar, 1995:
5). The ‘synchronic’ moment through reiteration in gossiped-about visibility
creates a diachronic collective memory to support an inclusive culture. In the
instances of a lesbian gossip column this is accomplished through the
established and everyday paradigms of narrative structure which produces a
shared and mutually understood experiential meaning.