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Description
This thesis investigates the experiences of womyn who defy traditional marital naming practices by keeping their names at marriage ("keepers"), as well as the types of conversations couples have about marriage and patronymy and its alternatives. Utilizing semi-structured interviews with 18 keepers and 10 engaged couples (20 individuals interviewed with their respective fiancés), I attempt to privilege the voices of those who have rarely been included in scholarship on patronymy: keepers as deviators from tradition, engaged couples in the process of making marital naming decisions, and men who are almost wholly excluded in prior scholarship. The interviews contribute crucial new information, most notably that keepers face such hostility from family, friends, husbands, and strangers as a result of their non-traditional practices that they often use their husbands" names to mediate that antagonism, and that engaged couples, while often politically and religiously liberal, possess rather static views of family and gender. The interviews with engaged couples in the process of making decisions demonstrate both that many couples do not consider alternatives to patronymy viable and that those who may be open in other realms are limited in this area by traditional notions of what constitutes a family, by hegemonic definitions of masculinity, and by devotion schemas (Blair-Loy, 2003) that shape their desires and choices. Overall, this thesis provides insight about the prevalence of patronymy today and its entrenchment as a cultural norm that insidiously perpetuates inequality and gender oppression. Its inclusion of a theoretical framework through which to view the results, as well as future work on patronymy, is the most unique and perhaps vital contribution of this thesis.
