Rasan-Rasan as Feminist Method: Gossip, Informal Talk, and Knowledge Production in Javanese Women’s Narratives

This article introduces rasan-rasan, a Javanese practice of informal talk or gossip, as a feminist qualitative research method. In contrast to structured interviews, rasan-rasan allows women to share narratives without the performative filtering typical in formal research encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with mothers in Nguter and Kendeng, Central Java, the study demonstrates how rasan-rasan functions as a relational epistemic practice: participants negotiate meaning collectively, voice dissent, and articulate experiences often hidden from conventional research methods. I explicitly reclaim “gossip” from its pejorative connotations, following feminist scholarship that positions informal talk as a legitimate site of knowledge production, relational truth-seeking, and epistemic resistance. Integrating feminist epistemology and gossip studies ( Adkins, 2002