Names and \u201cDoing Gender\u201d: How Forenames and Surnames Contribute to Gender Identities, Difference, and Inequalities

Jane Pilcher

doi:10.1007/s11199-017-0805-4

Abstract

Names, as proper nouns, are clearly important for the identification of individuals in everyday life. In the present article, I argue that forenames and surnames need also to be recognized as “doing” words, important in the categorization of sex at birth and in the ongoing management of gender conduct appropriate to sex category. Using evidence on personal naming practices in the United States and United Kingdom, I examine what happens at crisis points of sexed and gendered naming in the life course (for example, at the birth of babies, at marriage, and during gender-identity transitions). I show how forenames and surnames help in the embodied doing of gender and, likewise, that bodies are key to gendered practices of forenaming and surnaming: we have “gendered embodied named identities.” Whether normative and compliant, pragmatic, or creative and resistant, forenaming and surnaming practices are revealed as core to the production and reproduction of binary sex categories and to gendered identities, difference, hierarchies, and inequalities.

Highlights

Names, as proper nouns, are clearly important for the identification of individuals in everyday life
Governed as they are by common law and national or local statutes, practices of personal naming in the United Kingdom and United States are relatively unfettered by legislation
Forenames-plus-surnames operate in these kinds of ways simultaneously to display both individuality and connectedness. Though, it is my argument in the present article that forenames and surnames are constructing and displaying sex and gender

Summary

Introduction

As proper nouns, are clearly important for the identification of individuals in everyday life. Data from the United Kingdom and the United States on surname practices at marriage and divorce, the surnaming of children, and the characteristics of women making surname choices, along with evidence on a gender divide in support for conventional surnaming practices which privilege men’s surnames over women’s, suggest that patronymic and patrilineal surnaming practices are strongly related to (sex categorized) bodies and the doing of gender.

Results

Conclusion