Naming Identities: Politics of Identity

Abstract

The field of naming practices, and particularly those which evolve in an ambivalent context characterized by contradicting and conflicting forces, provides an opportunity to disentangle the complexity of the concepts “identity,” “becoming,” “belonging,” and last but not least the experience of “choice.” We discovered evidence of all these in our data, as it expose the intensified reflexivity that is involved in the decision making process that women go through regarding their family name after marriage. Women’s accounts of their marital names are most revealing in explicating women’s ability to experience themselves as making a “choice.” In order to clarify the relationships between all these concepts, our analysis of the empirical data is constructed through a range of analytical concepts, particularly “positioning,” “community of practice,” and the “discursive order.” Following this trail enables us to contribute new insights into current discussions on the ambivalence of discursive orders (Lazar, 2005), as it had not been yet connected to the notions of positioning and community of practice.