Gender, Names, and Fraud Charges

Today in my Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective class we were discussing a classic article about gender-based naming practices among some segments of Chinese society.  The basic point of the article is that names provide important clues to ideas of personhood which are profoundly gendered.  Men gain and choose for themselves a series of names throughout their life that continue to mark them as individuals, celebrate milestones and accomplishments, and demonstrate their ability to use the nuances of their language in interesting and cleaver ways.  Women, in contrast, are given names that connect them to hopes for the larger family, that mark them as wives or mothers, or that reference something from the time they were born.  Women have a tendency to lose individualized names as they age, being referred to sometimes even simply as “old woman.”  Our class discussion was very interesting and we were able to point out some continuity with practices like taking on a husband’s name at marriage along with the more obvious differences.

Then, one student mentioned a news story that I had somehow missed about a man in Florida who had his driver’s license revoked because, the state said, he had committed fraud in obtaining it.  The fraud? He had changed his last name to his wife’s when they were married.