Birth Name Research Articles

Andrey Platonov: Utopia as a private matter. On the writer’s first ‘five-year plan’ in literature

The article is concerned with the stylistic particularities of A. Platonov’s early works (the novellas The Sluices of Epiphany [Yepifanskie shlyuzy], The Innermost Man [Sokrovenniy chelovek], and For Future Use [Vprok]), characterized by a new kind of consciousness inspired by socialist utopia. In the opinion of the critic V. Kozlov, it is during the first Soviet five-year plan that Platonov’s style emerges as uniquely recognizable thanks to, among other things, his personal experience as a land amelioration engineer — a job he took under the birth name of Klimentov. Kozlov argues that a life in utopia as personally experienced by the first Soviet social and scientific activist and administrator finds its way into the personalities of Platonov’s characters as well as his plots and inimitable language of narration. However, by the end of the five-year period, the writer had unambiguously deviated from the path of the official Soviet literature. The reason being that, while the Soviet utopia had been conceived as a social and political project, Platonov’s works demonstrate that an individual may experience their private Soviet utopia, which often dramatically, if not tragically, differs from the collective idea.

On “Deadnaming” the “Vanishing Indian”

Recently, deadnaming has been the predominant terminology invoked to describe the act of referring to a trans* person by a former, but no longer used, name. While it is perceived as a formidable language to condemn this type of anti-transgender harm and violence, the necropolitical implications of referring to this act as “deadnaming” necessitates a trans* Indigenous critique of the manifestation of settler coloniality within transnormativity and its rhetoric. By analyzing the polarizing tension between birth name and deadname, this article turns to US legal documents, specifically the language within states’ legal birth certificates, for the better-for-now language of the “given name,” which might provide the destabilization needed to disrupt the temporal specificity implied within the “birth name” and “deadname” binary to imagine and embody an otherwise of the trans* imaginary. In thinking with Billy-Ray Belcourt's (Driftpile Cree) feral queer Indigeneity, this article concludes by surveying the possibilities of anti-colonial trans* experiences beyond the US settler nation-state's socio-legal surveillance, with its insistence on (trans*-/settler-) normative legibility (for “citizenship” within its biopolitical sphere).

The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in Early Twentieth-Century St. Louis by Benjamin Moore

Reviewed by: The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in Early Twentieth-Century St. Louis by Benjamin Moore Andrew Klumpp Benjamin Moore, The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in Early Twentieth-Century St. Louis. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. xvi, 345 pp. $50.00 (hardcover). Most historians know the exhilarating moment of finding new sources in the archive; however, for Benjamin Moore that serendipitous moment occurred while poking through a dumpster. A trove of discarded schoolwork introduced Moore to John Gergen, a young Banat Swabian immigrant who lived in St. Louis in the early twentieth century. With a keen eye for detail, Moore persistently unraveled Gergen's life, building a dynamic portrait of a young man and his family from the thin records they left behind. Moore's meticulous research has resulted in a remarkable tale of immigration, loss, adoption, struggle, death, and ultimately, identity. Moore structures the book around the development and demise of Gergen's foster family in St. Louis. The character of Gergen's eventual home in St. Louis's Soulard neighborhood in the early twentieth century comes alive in the first chapter, and chapter two focuses on the economic and political factors that affected Gergen's immigration, including the death of his birth father and the scattering of his siblings. These chapters will be most engaging for those interested in broader questions of immigration, community development, and identity formation. With the rich context established, Moore explores how Gergen's identity shifted and developed after his arrival in the United States as a toddler. We follow John and his foster parents in moves from tenements in Soulard to more prosperous residential neighborhoods, a migration that was common for many upwardly mobile urban immigrants in the United States. The salvaged schoolwork that originally inspired Moore is examined in extensive detail, allowing Moore to present possible conclusions about Gergen's intellectual capabilities. At the end of his brief life—Gergen died at twenty-six—he still lived with his foster family, although the naturalization process had led him to return to his birth name of John Albeck, setting aside his foster [End Page 204] family's name in at least some areas of his life. After a thorough journey through Gergen's life, the narrative concludes with the forgetting and the slow attrition of Banat Swabian culture and lifeways as the first and second generations passed away—yet another prominent and important theme in many immigration histories. Even with all of these details, Moore faced the challenge of a limited archive, specifically a lack of primary sources left by Gergen and his relatives. Undaunted, Moore gave us a startingly human understanding of Gergen's life and experience. The book's most striking feature is Moore's fastidious research into his subject's life. Readers will finish the book knowing that Moore has chased every lead, explored every angle, and given his readers as much information as possible about John Gergen. Moore's own passion for the project is the underlying pulse that beats throughout the book. Moore is at his best when he is humanizing Gergen and his family. He has done the meticulous work of reconstructing a life. His skill in textual analysis is apparent in his close examination of Gergen's schoolwork; however, historians may find that the conclusions reached, at times, are so tied to analysis of a particular text that they lack important contextualization in the broader immigrant experience in the United States. Historians of immigration will see many connections to themes that have motivated immigration history for decades, but these connections are largely unexplored. The introduction rightly states that Gergen's life illustrates the complex process of immigrant identity formation and development; however, it also claims to respond to and directly challenge twentieth-century immigration history, which was "hampered by a conceptual framework that undervalued persisting ties to the place of origin" (19). Yet two decades into the twenty-first century, immigration historians do grapple with immigrant identity formation and relationships with countries of origins in more complex ways. Deeper engagement with more recent scholarship produced by prominent historians of European immigration (like Robert P. Swierenga) or by scholars of Asian and...

Everyman by M Shelly Conner

Reviewed by: Everyman by M Shelly Conner Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) everyman M Shelly Conner Blackstone Publishing https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/everyman-dat0.html#541=91 350 pages; Print, $17.99 Since the 1920s, scholars and writers have tracked the progress of the six million African Americans over sixty years who left the segregated South and headed north in what is known as the Great Migration, one of the largest movements of people in history. With notable exceptions—James Baldwin, for instance; and the women of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)—the oral histories, sociological studies, poetry, and novels have been dominated by a heteronormative authority. In her new novel about the back-and-forth flow of people and their stories between the South and the nominal North, M Shelly Conner tries to correct this deficit, with arresting results. Conner's everyman—the name is just one of many of the book's mysteries—demonstrates how diverse is the village that goes into the making of one cis straight woman, as well as the durability and delicacy of family secrets supposedly buried in the ancestral homeland. In casting a wide net to excavate tales that might otherwise be neglected, Conner makes use of a broad swath of African American history and traditions. Some of the novel's most beguiling sequences occur when Conner mines the mythology of African American Hoodoo from New Orleans, enabling [End Page 70] a mother to protect her daughter from a potential predator. The education of one gangster reads at the beginning like a slave narrative, with a young innocent saving the life of a stranger on the run. That gangster's name, and how his mother settled on it, suggests a possible liaison between his mother and a famous white railroad tycoon. It's a far-fetched premise, especially since the tycoon and his actual son, with the same name, don't fit into the novel's timeline. (There are other glitches between the world of the novel and the historical record, especially in terms of popular culture.) But the interlocking stories between gay and straight life, such as the symbiotic existence of Blacks and whites, serve to remind how one has always informed the other through a tangle of memories, fears, desires, and denial—even if one side cannot acknowledge that truth. The scope of the novel, with its nonbinary characters, leaves open the question why Conner did not make her protagonist gay or gender-nonconforming. Every Mann, also known as Eve, is not even a particularly good gay ally. She is "devastated" to learn her childhood friend Nelle is a lesbian and calls her own thoughts about homosexuality "disturbingly impure." Eve rationalizes her distaste for Nelle's sexuality not through church teachings or conventional morality but through the politics of the period: "Eve had been indoctrinated in the 1960s Black Power politics of black babies for the revolution and gays and lesbians could not naturally produce them." Nelle, meanwhile, calls Eve's desire "to really find myself in this world" a "straight luxury"—that even her best friend is too enveloped in her own needs to acknowledge Nelle's particular struggle. Yet the bulk of the novel takes place in 1972, when the options for Black liberation have been cut down by government persecution and state-sanctioned violence. To satisfy the requirements of a college class led by Brother LeRoi (whose name evokes the late Amiri Baraka's birth name, Everett LeRoi Jones), Eve must write a family history. The assignment collides with both the determination of Eve's aunt to reveal nothing and the declining influence of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. If Eve is to liberate herself from the subjugation of her aunt's shame, she will have to embark on a path of self-discovery that is not only narrowly focused but also personal. What Eve uncovers when she travels to the railroad town of Ideal, in Macon County, Georgia, is a sprawling, sometimes brutal history that might [End Page 71] otherwise be lost to treachery and humiliation. Eve's particular quest for the origins of her name recalls Frederick Douglass's attempts to learn the name...

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Camazot's Ballgame, and: Birth Name Unknown

Camazot's Ballgame, and: Birth Name Unknown Alejandra Cabezas (bio) Camazot's Ballgame My mother held a cross and prayed, "please, stop exceeding your flesh." Little does she know every night I make myself a nothing — cut off my breasts, and squeeze what's left into a blowgun. There, I wait — my sight split between bats and the Age of the First Sun. I know my fate is sealed. Having no twin brother, I myself, will set sight on Xibalba. But the men will have me before death. And what better way to spend the rest of my days? A plaything for the gods, they call themselves. [End Page 14] Birth Name Unknown One would think I'm made by men. Conjurers, the devils in their minds. The lusty ones are all the better artists for that. Couldn't carve a piece of wood if I asked them to. They love to paint pictures no one else will see. Maybe they believe their own tales. They'd have you think the spirits wait for them. As though we have nothing to discuss amongst ourselves. Them, when we're angry, of course. But I've taught my daughters to walk around naked when the moon is full. It's good for their skin and temperance. I was never very good at holding back. Carved my own wrinkles trying to make myself an ugly thing. A thing that lasts. From the way men speak of me. You'd think me godlike. [End Page 15] Alejandra Cabezas Alejandra Cabezas is a poet and scholar from Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador. Her work deals with family histories, the Mayan cosmovision, and movements across Mesoamerica. She currently resides in Amsterdam, where she is receiving a Master of Arts in Museums and Heritage. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Devour Me

Devour Me Yuki Fuwa (bio) Translated by Toshiya Kamei (bio) In this short story from Japan, the narrator—who is disappearing organ by organ—dissolves into a library as encompassing as the cosmos. Click for larger view View full resolution PHOTO BY GREG RAKOZY & ALFONS MORALES ON UNSPLASH I chose to live as a part of the school. I belong to the library. My devotion has led to organ donation. S. R. Ranganathan, who was considered the father of library science in India, authored The Five Laws of Library Science. Here’s the fifth, and last, law—the library is a growing organism. You know what’s ironic? A twentieth-century scholar predicted the future. The library actually grows as it chews, digests, and integrates all kinds of information. I was born into the third cybergeneration, so it’s a cinch for me to merge with the library. The linguistic barrier has crumbled down. I, watashi, and 我 . . . are all me. I’ve renounced my birth name and gender. Does an information entity need gender? The answer is no. Even so, everybody who comes here becomes feminine. Thanks to her influence. My liver is being taken from my body. It doesn’t matter. Let us visit the Asian History section today. I zip through aisles and hurry toward my destination. No, there’s no hurry. I accelerate like a particle and leap to the destination in a second. I’m glad that I’ve gotten rid of my physical body. That’s the best decision I’ve made. At the Asian History section, the Mongolian cavalry storms away. A patron has checked them out. She’s a thirteen-year-old girl. Nowadays hardly anyone reads physical books. As textual information is stored visually, most patrons prefer videos. I monitor the patron’s heart rate. At times, history shows them a scene of unparalleled atrocity. Checking the patron’s mental state, stopping the video in case somebody passes out in shock: these are also a part of my job description. Half an hour later, the patron disengages from accessing. Perhaps she will go back to the afternoon class. Since I transitioned to this side, I don’t know if my school still physically remains. How many brick-and-mortar schools are still left in the world? Physical schools you can touch. Schools accept only a select few. I play the rest of the video. Temüjin, the future Genghis Khan, will conquer vast territories of land. Another part falls from my body. This time my skin peels off. Maybe some building has collapsed somewhere. A few kids still intend to access the library. They must be afraid of going to their class. I could log them off forcibly, but I won’t do that. I turn into a ghost and access one of them. Pity kids with no freedom. They’re not allowed to discard their bodies yet. I send them a message: “With age comes privilege.” Then the patron’s mental patterns turn from red to green. There, there. Here we go. The library doubles as the health office for bullied kids who are afraid of going to school. Those kids can [End Page 60] hide in the forest of books, away from their classmates, parents, and teachers. I hop on my broomstick and speed across the sky. The Western Civilization section is full of mysteries, always brimming with curses, hexes, and spells. At last, my heart is removed from my body. But I couldn’t care less. I keep soaring to meet her—Mother. A city on the moon lies at the center of the universe now. The atmosphere snatches away my broom and puts me in a space suit. I zip across the dark expanse and land on the dome covering the lunar city. “It’s you again,” the dome says in a slow, feminine voice. It’s Mother. “Here I am.” “Do you feel like a girl now?” “I may feel like a boy tomorrow.” “Is that so?” The library’s motherboard is always connected. She re-creates the construction of the lunar city in real time. The soaring spires beneath the dome remind me of New York...

Polygamous Family Life and Geographic Isolation: The Poetry of Esther Ann Birch Bennion

Polygamous Family Life and Geographic Isolation: The Poetry of Esther Ann Birch Bennion

Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite

Reviewed by: Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite Brian Maidment (bio) Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. x + 272, $120/£80 hardcover. If not for Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite’s dedicated interest, “Marie Duval” (1847–90) might well have continued to languish as a subject of scholarly interest, the true extent and importance of her work obscured by the complexities of her many adopted identities and by the ascription of many of her cartoons in Judy to her husband, C. H. Ross, who edited the magazine. The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism acknowledges that Emilie de Tessier (Duval’s birth name) “took on the majority of the drawing of Ally Sloper” (Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism [London: Academia Press, 2009], 327). Richard Scully concentrates on William Boucher’s political cartoons as the central defining feature of Judy, though he concedes that after 1869 it was “the ‘clever lady’ Duval, rather than her husband who chronicled the further adventures of Ally Sloper” (Eminent Victorian Cartoonists [London: Political Cartoon Society, 2018], 2:65). But it has taken the combined and unrelenting efforts of Grennan, Sabin, and Waite to establish Duval’s full importance for understanding late Victorian popular culture. In 2018 they published Marie Duval, a lightly annotated but lively and visually arresting anthology of Duval’s work for Judy, which showed for the first time how extensively her cartoons had proliferated beyond the Ally Sloper strips already associated with her name. Their Marie Duval Archive offers an extensive, versatile, and easily accessible online database comprising over 950 of the cartoonist’s images, prefaced with the unequivocal view that “Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century” (https://www.marieduval.org). And now comes their collaborative monograph on Duval. The authors bring rich experience and scholarship in various forms of popular culture to this endeavour. Sabin is renowned as a media-savvy historian of comics. Among much else, Grennan has written graphic novels including a reworking of Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate. Waite has a background in street theatre and popular [End Page 653] performance. Together they bring more to their subject than the traditional English literature, art history, and history disciplines that inform most scholarly work on periodicals. The multiple authors work together to recover and document Duval’s complex creative life. Sabin’s opening chapter describes her career at Judy and offers an analysis of her graphic originality, which brought some “vernacular and untutored,” “loose and gestural” pizazz to Judy’s “serio-comic” brief, often in the form of a comic strip (23). In chapter 3, Waite provides a chronological account of Duval’s career as an actress, no easy feat given the absence of many texts and the difficulties of researching and interpreting lost performances. Sabin offers a detailed account in the fourth chapter of Duval’s children’s book, Queens and Kings and Other Things (1874), “a spectacular comedy book, notable for the quality of its production and the freewheeling recklessness of its content” (99). These three chapters gain immeasurably from being able to cite the Marie Duval Archive and suggest the creative ways in which digital resources can interact with more traditionally presented research. While such a detailed biographical account of Duval is important, the book’s more contextual and speculative chapters pose valuable challenges to the reader. Given the complexities, obscurities, and sheer variety of her creative output, Duval’s career asks difficult questions about, for example, the ways in which she drew on her theatrical experience beyond the theatre. In response to questions like these, Grennan’s chapter “Marie Duval and the Woman Employee” centres on the “creation of new identities, derived from reciprocal negotiations between entrenched and emerging concepts of femininity and masculinity, relative to the business of periodical print” in order to suggest connections between Duval’s stage performances and her performance of femininity in her graphic work (58). Both frequently subverted traditional definitions of gender, work, and what Grennan calls “visual journalism” (63). Crucially...

Emerging adults’ preferred surnames: Reasons and social cognitive dispositions

Surname practices in the U.S. are believed to reflect and reinforce the enduring patriarchal nature of U.S. society. Yet, some women and men reject patriarchal expectations. Calls for research accounting for such individual variations have been made. We examine the role that dispositional differences play in preferences for and reasoning about marital surnames in a sample of U.S. heterosexual women and men. With an online survey, we examined 799 heterosexual unmarried emerging adults’ (mean age = 19.9) preferences for their own and a future partner’s surname, reasons for their preferences, and associations with social cognitive dispositions relevant to self- and other-orientations: narcissism and perspective-taking. The findings suggest greater flexibility about women’s surname preferences than previously reported. Approximately one-third of men and women were open to nontraditional options. Reasons for preferences included heritage, tradition, masculinity norms, conceptions of marriage and family, identity, family pressures, and practical reasons. After controlling for age, relational status, traditionalism, autonomy, and career aspirations, lower perspective-taking was predictive of women’s preferences for both partners to retain their birth names, whereas greater narcissism was associated with women’s preferences to retain their birth name. Greater narcissism was associated with men’s desires for both partners to use his name. Taken together, the addition of individual difference dispositions provides greater insight into surname preferences and reasons for those preferences beyond gender masculinity norms.

Name Reclamation for Transracial Korean Adoptee Returnees in the United States and Europe

This qualitative study explored the experiences of transracial Korean adoptee returnees who were born in Korea, separated from their biological families, raised in the United States and three European countries by White families, and given an Anglicized or Germanic name at the time of their adoption. This study focused on participants’ journeys of reclaiming their Korean birth names and the various influences that factored into this decision. Data were collected from in-depth, semi-structured interviews (in-person or via Skype) and coded using grounded-theory methods that integrated a constructivist-interpretivist and critical epistemological paradigm . Participants (N = 12) were transracial Korean adoptees with ages ranging from 22 to 42 years (M = 32.67 years) who were between 0 and 88 months (M = 22.33 months) at the time of adoption, all of whom had returned to Korea. Results from the interviews revealed 11 axial categories and 2 overarching selective categories related to the name reclamation process: (a) name reclamation was part of a larger identity development process; (b) factors that prevented or slowed the name reclamation process. Limitations and future areas of research are discussed.

Translingual Discrimination: Skilled Transnational Migrants in the Labour Market of Australia

Abstract Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data, this study examines the language-based discriminatory experiences of skilled transnational migrants in the labour market of Australia. Moving beyond two main concepts of ‘interlingual’ and ‘intra-lingual’ discrimination in applied linguistics, this article points out the concept of ‘translingual discrimination’, which refers to inequality based on transnational identities’ specific linguistic repertoires and backgrounds that are substantiated by the national order of things. Translingual discrimination adds intensity to transnational processes, with the skilled migrants showing particular potential for exclusion regarding two factors: translingual ‘name discrimination’ and ‘English discrimination’. ‘Translingual name discrimination’ is a homogenous form of ‘name’ policing, evident in multiple examples where the skilled transnational migrants’ job applications are often largely rejected on the grounds of their ‘birth name’ written on their curriculum vitae. ‘Translingual English discrimination’ is another common form of discrimination, where the skilled transnational migrants become subject to discrimination based on their English proficiency and their overall language skills, leading to ‘the paradoxes of migration’—discrepancies between the imagination and the reality—where they fall from ‘hero to zero’ in the host society.

Professor H. Gutfreund, FRS (21 October 1921 to 21 March 2021)

Professor H. Gutfreund, FRS (21 October 1921 to 21 March 2021)

Persecuted in the Third Reich, revered in the USA: Frank Everett (birth name: Franz Ehrenfest) and his contribution to periodontology (1907-1976)

ABSTRACT The Viennese dentist Frank Everett was a pioneer of periodontology. He received numerous honours and shaped the teaching of generations of dentists. Despite his professional significance, Everett’s life has hardly been investigated. Few know that he was persecuted by the Nazis and had to start over in the USA. The article reveals the circumstances of his disenfranchisement in the Third Reich and argues out that his success in the States was based on a combination of personal characteristics, favourable conditions in the Chicago university landscape and the nimbus of the Jewish ‘Vienna School’ of oral pathology.

Equiano’s World: Chronicling the Life and Times of Gustavus Vassa

Equiano’s World (www.equianosworld.org) is a website that chronicles the life and times of Gustavus Vassa (c. 1741–1797), who is known most frequently by his birth name, Olaudah Equiano. Vassa became well known in Britain after the publication of his autobiography in 1789 and for his prominent role in the movement for abolition of the British slave trade, which was only finally enacted in 1807, ten years after his death. The associated database includes all known documentation on Vassa and information relevant to the study of his life. Foremost among these materials is his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which was republished nine times in his lifetime. Other documentation includes contemporary newspaper accounts, legal documents, and images from his life experiences. The website addresses issues arising from the context of Vassa’s life, including his place of birth, his name, and his influence on the abolition movement. It demonstrates that he only wanted to be known by the name he was given when he was enslaved rather than by his birth name; even today he is best known as Olaudah Equiano or even simply Equiano, even though Equiano was not a surname. His unusual experience as an enslaved servant to a British naval officer during the Seven Years’ War and afterwards to a merchant in the Caribbean gave him particular insight into the horrors of slavery and his commitment to its abolition. Because of the education he received on British ships and subsequently in London after he purchased his own freedom, he stands out as a prominent and literate intellectual and political activist. His autobiography continues to be read widely and taught in university courses. The project is part of a broader initiative that explores the testimonies and personal profiles of Africans who were enslaved during the era of slavery, most of whom were taken to the Americas.The article outlines the structure of the website into seven sections: first, a Home page that includes a project history, acknowledgements, technical details, and a discussion of the “Best Practices” that underlie the project. The second section focuses on Context, examining key settings from the interior of the Bight of Biafra where Vassa was born, the slave trade of the late eighteenth century, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, the Seven Years’ War, and London and Britain in the late eighteenth century. The section on his travels has a chronological timeline and maps relating to them. The Associates section contains biographical sketches and images of his family, those whom he knew while he was enslaved, his associates in the Abolition movement, his co-religionists, and his connections in scientific and military circles. It also includes a list of individuals who subscribed to his autobiography. The section on Studying Equiano includes his autobiography, a list of its editions, and over 200 legal documents, letters, and newspaper notices and accounts. The Resources section includes a bibliography of several hundred items that discuss Vassa and his work, as well as audio and visual resources, links to websites on Vassa, slavery and diaspora. This article discusses technical details of website construction, which uses a backend known as Regenerated Identities (RegID). The website relies on open-source content and has a search function that enables location of people, places, and periods relevant to Vassa’s life.

Confronting Heterosexism

Confronting Heterosexism Ilka Scobie (bio) Funeral Diva Pamela Sneed City Lights http://www.citylights.com 160 Pages; Print, $11.87 Now is a moment when we crave bravery and inspiration. Pamela Sneed’s much acclaimed Funeral Diva provides both, as well as provocative explorations of race, gender, rage, compassion, and love. The poet, a remarkable performer, manages to replicate the energy and immediacy of her live readings in this volume. Equal doses of self-examination and refreshing self-deprecation are juxtaposed in her exhilarating prose and poetry. Confident, charming, original and blessed with keen self-awareness, Sneed’s voice articulates her reality as a proud Black, lesbian, and adopted daughter. Her introductory chapter is a traumatized child’s travelogue, who grows up to be a punk adventurer, world traveler, bohemian, educator, and committed artist and activist. The book begins with “History,” a prose memoir. With admirable Bodhisattva compassion, Sneed is able to forgive a birth mother who abandoned her, an adoptive and unstable mother who abruptly left, and an adoptive family whose suburban household was violent and unloving. Detailing an early love affair, she says she is unable to leave, “So I stayed… doing drugs and hurting myself.” Sneed recognizes she was unable to leave as “I couldn’t do someone what was done to me.” “My father was a monster I know,” she writes in a memorial to her first adopted mother, “Ruth Vick.” And the adult Pamela is able to recognize, “I know now in retrospect she was fleeing / for her life / from abuse/ She tried to take me / but that failed.” She is even able to extend forgiveness to an old friend “who heap damage on you and act as if it never happened.” And who leaves her in a loft where she feels “naked and afraid.” As a young student Sneed recognizes, “The home I cried out for was not my parent’s house, but a warm place in me.” “Life changing” travels to the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe expand her vision, and she lands in New York. “In fact, if my life were divided into halves, I would label them pre- and post-Ghana.” After the first compelling chapter, the engaging prose leaps from adolescent love affairs to “Ila” meditations on her true birth name, “because for child adoptees, birth names are fictitious.” With help from her mother, she legally changes her name to Pamela, “because it had the ring of a princess.” Thus, Ila becomes Pamela, “leaving my name like a country of birth behind.” Following the recognition that her chosen name has truly become her moniker is the long title poem “Funeral Diva”. Sneed powerfully documents an urban counter cultural history that begins in the 1980’s, the same decade that I returned to New York and confronted the ever burgeoning AIDS epidemic. Deeply immersed in emerging Black queer culture, Sneed says, “We were in formation. / We were making ourselves.” Sneed is not describing a fashion victim’s romantic comedy fag-hagdom. Instead, she traces her growth as an “activist and founder” in “These were early days, AIDS in its infancy.” Documenting a Black male literary collective, Other Countries, she declares, “I saw each collective member as a brother. / In return I became their sister.” The self declared “Funeral Diva” “became a known and requested presence operating throughout the crisis. / … called for at memorials, readings, wakes and funerals to speak / give testimony and credence to men’s lives.” Sneed memorializes and documents a decimated creative community that was lost too young, “a generation no longer here.” Sneed becomes the one who learns to “accurately portray and pay homage to the spirit of someone / who’d lived only for a short time upon this planet.” Amid a battalion of prejudice, fear and disinformation, people — at first, mostly beautiful young men — battled a fatal and little understood new disease. I watched lifelong friends transmute from frivolous hedonists to courageous caretakers. I saw friends abandoned by their families and then nurtured by lifesaving community networks. Organizations like Visual Aids and ACT UP rose to focus on a health crisis the government ignored. Sneed gives dramatic voice and clear vision to the history of those...

“That Name Is Dead to Me”: Reforming Name Change Laws to Protect Transgender and Nonbinary Youth

Content warning: this Article discusses suicidality. For transgender and some nonbinary youth, living under a chosen name is a first step toward becoming their authentic selves. For these youth, a name change is powerful; it allows them to choose a name that matches their gender identity. They consider their birth name to be a distressing “dead” name—one that they cannot relate to and need to bury. Using one’s chosen name decreases suicidality among transgender youth who face many challenges, including family rejection and other severe mental health stressors. Transgender and nonbinary youth can only require others to use their chosen names after obtaining a legal name change. But only two states in the nation currently allow minors to change their name legally without their parents’ consent and active assistance. Parental consent requirements are problematic because youth whose parents do not support their gender identity must wait, exposed to harm and distress. Thus, we deny them this first step towards correcting their gender and the accompanying mental health relief—delaying youth who have otherwise transitioned years before adulthood. In the meantime, with identification cards that do not match their gender identity, transgender and nonbinary youth are at risk of discrimination and other harm. They may drop out of school and avoid seeking employment for fear of bias and rejection. Our laws must change to protect our transgender and nonbinary youth by allowing them to change their legal name independently. Their mental health and well-being depend on these crucial reforms.

Naming Rights? Analysing Child Surname Disputes in Australian Courts Through a Gendered Lens

Despite major advances in gender equality, patrilineal naming—children being granted their father’s surname—persists as a largely unquestioned norm in those Western countries with predominantly Anglo traditions, even in families where mothers retain their birth names. In Australia, when parents cannot agree on the child’s surname, the issue will go to a court or tribunal, to be decided by a judicial decision-maker. Apart from Jonathan Herring’s (2009) work in the UK, such cases have been little examined by scholars. This paper explores the question of whether child surnames chosen by Australian courts—a supposedly neutral and objective third party—uphold patriarchal logic or provide more equitable outcomes. Using a feminist critical discourse framework, we examine five recent court judgments about child surname disputes, and six news articles about these types of cases. While these cases are not a representative sample, we find that, despite the existence of specific legal principles relating to children’s surnames, decision-makers’ judgments were inconsistent and subjective. Furthermore, mothers’ names tended to be granted to children when fathers were deemed to be ‘bad dads.’

A Dream of Dual Citizenship

Many problems exist for United States (U.S.) descendants of Cabo Verde (In 2015, the government of Cabo Verde asked in the United Nations that the official name be Cabo Verde in all documents, opposed to the colonial version, “Cape Verde”) Islands seeking dual citizenship. Much of this is due to multiple 20th century racial discriminatory practices by the U.S. in soliciting cheap labor from Cabo Verde Islands, including changing the birth names of Cabo Verdean immigrants when they entered the United States. Without knowing the true birth names of their ancestors, descendants such as myself have no access to proof of birth in the dual citizenship process. Years often pass by as Cabo Verdean Americans search for clues that may lead to proving their legal status through family stories, and track related names as well as birth and death records. For many, dual citizenship may never be granted from the Cabo Verdean government, despite having U.S. death certificates that state that the family member was born in Cabo Verde. This autobiographical case study explores why so many Cabo Verdean Americans seek dual citizenship with a strong desire to connect to their motherland. Moreover, issues related to language, class and colorism discrimination between Cabo Verdean-born immigrants and descendants in the U.S. are explored. In so doing, the researcher hopes to ameliorate the divisions between the current government policies and Cabo Verdean American descendants, as well as build greater intracultural connections between those born in the Cabo Verde Islands and those born in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Representing Perpetrators

Representing Perpetrators