Sunday 26 April 2015

Implied sexism in UK Deed Poll procedures

Who changes their name upon marriage/civil partnership? 

By Laura L. Paterson



I did not change my name upon marriage. However, it was interesting to see just how many people thought that they could question my decision and/or change my mind. Some of the most most surprising reactions to my choice came from loose acquaintances who assumed that they had some sort of say in my decision. For example, an (unmarried, female) extended-family-member-of-a-friend lambasted my husband for not making me change my name. 

There were also logistical issues: my husband and I had to tell our wedding guests that if they wrote us a cheque, it had to be made out to our existing surnames otherwise the bank wouldn’t cash it. Furthermore, when completing legal documentation for a family member’s will, my father asked me to spell my surname. Initially thinking that he was joking – we share the same surname and people consistently spell it wrong – I  began spelling out my surname letter by letter. He stopped me and said ‘no, no, no, how do you spell Mackintosh’? It turned out that, even though my father knew I had kept my surname, he assumed that because I was married I was legally ‘Mrs Mackintosh’. Based on these experiences, I decided to look at how entrenched the idea that a woman changes her name upon marriage is within UK legal procedures.

According to the UK Deed Poll service (2009), ‘Contrary to popular belief, a woman’s surname does not automatically change to her husband’s surname upon marriage’. However, whilst most surname changes in the UK are performed using a Deed Poll, for a woman to change her name to her husband’s does not require this process to take place, as it is seen as the woman choosing to ‘follow tradition’. A Deed Poll is likely to be required though when a woman chooses to double-barrel her name. But what is extremely interesting is that, if both husband and wife are double-barrelling, it is economically sensible for the husband to pay for a Deed Poll to change his surname before the wedding ceremony so that the wife can take this double-barrelled name upon their union without charge/Deed Poll: ‘the cost of a second Deed Poll (for your wife) can be avoided if you change your surname by Deed Poll to your double-barrelled surname before you marry’ (UK Deed Poll Service 2006). However, this practice does not work the other way around. If a wife-to-be double-barrels her surname before the wedding, her husband will still need a Deed Poll to double-barrel his. Thus, the legal system for name changes is asymmetrical. It is not set up for a husband to take his wife’s surname. Further evidence of this asymmetry is that the UK Deed Poll Service has web pages devoted to women changing their names upon separation/divorce/widowhood, but no corresponding pages for men. Thus, there is a clear assumption that men don’t (wish to) change their names.

The UK Deed Poll website harbours lots of assumptions about women and men. For example, it is stated that ‘most women are happy to take their husband’s surname upon marriage’ and ‘you will probably want to change your title to Mrs’ (UK Deed Poll service 2009). Taking the positions of ‘no I’m not happy’ and/or ‘no I don’t want to change my title’ is extremely difficult here as such statements reject the status quo established on the service's website. When discussing males changing their names, it is suggested that a man could take his ‘wife’s surname as one of your middle names’ (not as a surname) and that ‘Such a gesture may be greatly appreciated’ (UK Deed Poll service 2006). This construction of a name change as a ‘gesture’ suggests that a man would only change his name upon marriage to placate his wife who, presumably, has changed her surname.

In terms of civil partnerships (the UK Deed Poll Service has not yet updated its pages to address same-sex marriage), if one person takes the other’s surname, then no Deed Poll is needed (UK Deed Poll Service 2010). When double-barrelling, it is also advised that one person changes their name before the ceremony to avoid the cost of two Deed Polls (2010), although, for obvious reasons, there is no mention here of which partner is expected to change their name before the ceremony. At least here, the laws are gender-neutral. But it is still assumed that ‘Most female civil partners want to change their title from either Miss to Ms or from Miss or Ms to Mrs’ although it is noted that ‘Mrs is traditionally the title used by married women’ (UK Deed Poll service 2010). This presupposes that Mrs is not the only available title to lesbian couples, and implies that the label Mrs may not apply to them in the same way that it applies to heterosexual women. Again, there is no mention of men changing their names, reflecting the asymmetry in English titles (Mr vs. Miss, Mrs or Ms). 

Traditional patriarchal norms are enshrined in current UK surname change processes, with women presented as being much more likely to change their surnames and/or titles upon marriage/civil partnership than men. Such norms can lead to the assumption that all women will change their name upon union. Indeed, it was such as assumption that led to relative strangers objecting to my choice to keep my own surname, whilst not a single person asked my partner why he was not changing his. This related notion - that men do not change their surnames - is clearly reflected in the Deed Poll process. Any men wishing to change their surnames (with the exception of those entering into civil partnerships/same-sex marriage, as discussed above) will have more administrative work to do than women. Thus, there is clearly disparity in how the law treats men and women upon marriage/civil partnership.  


References

UK Deed Poll Service. 2009. A woman’s name change rights and options upon marriage. Online. Available at: http://www.deedpoll.org.uk/AWomansRightsUponMarriage.html. Accessed 10/03/2015.
UK Deed Poll Service. 2006. A man’s name change rights and options upon marriage. Online. Available at: http://www.deedpoll.org.uk/AMansRightsUponMarriage.html. Accessed 10/03/2015.
UK Deed Poll Service. 2010. A couple’s name change rights and options upon a civil partnership. Online. Available at: http://www.deedpoll.org.uk/ACouplesRightsUponACivilPartnership.html. Accessed 10/03/2015.

Wednesday 18 March 2015

Name change debates around Amal Clooney’s change of name



An account of below the line comments on Amal Almahuddin's name change

By Sara Mills



Amal Clooney
The Discourses of Marriage research group have been investigating the views that are expressed about women’s surname changes on marriage.  This blog post examines the range of comments around the surname change of lawyer and activist  Amal Almahuddin, who changed her name to Amal Clooney when she married the actor George Clooney in October 2014.  We gathered together the below the line comments from articles in the Mail Online, theguardian.com and Huffington Post (links below) and have grouped them under the following themes.

Themes

This issue of surname change generated a great number of below the line comments, largely because Clooney stated that she would use her new surname at work, whereas many professional women retain their own surname within the context of work. The debates were fairly aggressive, particularly on the Guardian story, where the issue of a woman’s right to choose was debated and became an attack on feminists. Fraser (2009) has argued that feminism has split into feminism as a social movement and feminism as discourse, with the latter having 'gone rogue'.  The feminist movement now is 'increasingly confronted with a strange shadowy version of itself, an uncanny double that it can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavow' (Fraser, cited in Carter, et al, 2015: 27). This is particularly true of this data where the feminist slogan 'a woman’s right to choose' is used against feminists who are questioning why Amalhuddin took Clooney’s surname.  Here, rather than being an issue of patriarchy, taking his surname is framed as a question of free choice.


Surname change is a feminist issue

Some posts framed this as a feminist issue, however, saying that it would be more newsworthy if men’s surname changes on marriage were reported. One said: 'Victoria Coren is now Victoria Coren Mitchell, but David is still just "Mitchell". Why? This is a feminist issue'.




This is a trivial issue

Others, however, commented that there were too many articles about this issue and that it was not important.  They accused her of turning into another Kim Kardashian. One stated sarcastically: 'Please, please do keep us updated on every trivial thing these incredibly brave people do'.


Mockery/humour

Some posters stated that she should change her first name or that he should change his name to hers. There were some posts which stated that they would use the name Clooney all of the time if they were married to him.  One post stated they 'would like to live in a society where couples can choose a third party name when they get married like "divisionator", "skelebomb' or "wheeled-deathmachine".' There were quite a number of mocking posts like this.


A woman’s right to change her surname

The main focus of the below the line comments seemed to be those who posed it as about a woman’s right to choose her surname (viewing this as part of a feminist history, whilst at the same time attacking feminists), and those who asked questions about whether that choice was in fact feminist at all, in that it was a tradition. In the Guardian piece 'Amal Alamuddin took George Clooney's name? Oh please – put your torches and pitchforks away', there was an indirect attack on feminists for bringing up the issue of surname change. And one poster said: 'why would she not take his name? leave her in peace now to do her job and get on with her life'. Posing this as an issue of simple choice, one poster said 'I don't get why people would go nuts because she took his last name. Surely the point is that it was her choice whether to or not?' Another post said 'I thought the business of naming was entirely a personal choice? And if it is somehow 'offensive' to keep referring to [Chelsea] Manning by a male name, why is it not similarly offensive to fail to acknowledge the woman's right to change her name?'.  One post drew attention to gay friends: 'I'm friends with a gay couple who recently married and they decided that one of them would adopt the other's name purely because it was a much nicer sounding name. No angst, no guilt'.  Other posts argued that the change of a surname should not be subject to scrutiny: 'Some of the most successful women I know changed their name when they married without, as far as I could tell, giving much thought at all to it. I believe to them it is simply a practical matter. I guess that's the thing about successful women (and people): they can make their own decisions and get on with things without viewing everything in life as an attempt to victimise them'.


Indirect attacks on feminists

Several posters took this as an opportunity to attack feminists: 

So much hate from feminists when women do things that they disagree with. Such bullying. People have the right to do what they wish, and you have no right to comment on it. The world is full of different people with different needs than the hard core feminists. The hatred spewed by feminist groups against women who live their lives in ways they disagree with is disgusting. A woman taking a man's name, or staying home to raise children, is not weak, subjugated or backward. Just as the feminists are, these women are well thought out and making decisions they should be respected for, regardless of what other think about it. Feminists need to stop the hate.'

 Other posters defended a feminist position: 

You do realise that by telling feminists (as if they're some homogeneous group) to focus their attention on "more important things" you're doing precisely the thing you're railing against: telling women what they should do. I'm quite entitled to see Amal Clooney's adoption of her husband's name as a really strange thing for an educated, "liberal, middle class" (your words), respected professional woman to do. It strikes me as a coy buying into of romance, a stroke to the male's ego. Given that full equality still doesn't exist, it would've been more interesting if you'd interrogated why women still feel the need to turn their husbands into protectors and themselves into damsels enfolded in their men's last names. Could it be that women are the final stumbling block to full equality, because they cannot let go of those final bastions of male privilege?
Another post stated: 'Yes funny that, what an amazing array of choices that women have, and how most of them still seem to choose the option invented for them by men'. To counter the notion that it is a woman’s right to choose, another poster stated: 'I think the debate here refers not to women's right to change their names, but to their tendency to stick to the patriarchal status quo rather than asserting their individuality'. 

Thus, overall, the issue of a celebrity woman changing her surname to that of her husband seemed to be viewed as fairly trivial.  The debate in the below the line comments largely seemed to construct the issue in terms of 'a woman’s right to choose'  (a feminist slogan) as being under threat from feminists.

We are considering these perspectives, and more, in our analysis of responses to our survey on surname choices following marriage. We'll report back with our findings when we have them!



Sources

Mail Online 15th October 2014

theguardian.com 14th October 2014
theguardian.com 15th October 2014

Huffington Post 14th October 2014



References

Carter, C., Steiner L., McLaughlin L. (eds) 2015. The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender, Routledge: London

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Wednesday 28 January 2015

“She’s not my friend anymore”

The Discourses of Marriage group is delighted to be able to share this piece by Dr Liz Morrish (Nottingham Trent University), which shows some of the complexities associated with language choice and marriage for same-sex couples.

Meanwhile, our work exploring the data from our surnames survey continues...watch this space (or see our previous post) for more information!

Thanks to Liz for sharing this piece with us. 


She's not my friend anymore
 “Those pants suit you” I said to the woman in Athleta on 5th Avenue, New York. “My friend is in there trying on the same ones”.
Sender would like to recall message. I am appalled at my betrayal. Hardly has the ink dried on our marriage certificate, and I have already repudiated my spouse. If discourse brings about identity, then mine is still stuck in that queer limbo of illegitimacy that she and I have inhabited for the last 25 years.
Too much information. The woman in the store didn’t need to know all of this. But then again, why not? How easy it would have been to announce a husband to the most casual of acquaintances. So why not my, my, my wwwwww. No. I still can’t say the ‘w’ word. It’s a bit too Susan Calman. She is my partner in marriage, my trouble-and-strife, her-indoors, my spouse.
Shame is the eternal companion to the queer subject, even decades after decriminalization. Shame at the non-normativity of being queer. Shame at never quite fully accepting myself. Shame at finding it so difficult to lay claim to the legitimacy now offered to me. Because the day before, I had got married, hitched, wedded, espoused. To my ‘friend’ in the changing booth behind us. We arrived at City Hall, in Wall Street with our two witnesses. We took a numbered ticket and sat down to wait on the green benches until we went into the small chapel, and there, stumbling and trembling on the words, I was married to the love of my life. I have thought about that moment every day since.
If you are wondering what all the equivocation is about, just consider this. Shame is not a singular event; it accrues over a lifetime, undermining like a degenerative disease. From earliest childhood, all we have known are anxieties about being feminine enough, straight enough, respectable enough. As we emerge from the family we encounter an immersive queering as school firmly establishes our outsider status when we are found desiring sports or activities deemed the provenance of the so-called opposite ‘sex’. Our world falls into a preserve of binaries that seems to have forgotten to give us an entry pass.
So when Section 28 came along in the United Kingdom in 1988, gay subjectivity was already complicit in its own illegitimacy. Forbidden: "the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".
So there you have it. My relationship is a mere simulation of the real thing. Maybe that is why my marriage seemed rather like a mirage. I think back to that brief ceremony. Brief, but not perfunctory. The Clerk had it all right. She must have met bashful queers before. So habitually circumspect about public displays of affection, we had to be prompted twice to take each other’s hands. We hesitated on the permissive ‘you may kiss your spouse’.
So it is still sinking in, what marriage means to someone who has never thought it would be a possibility. What it will mean for us as a couple. But now that we have done it, I need to step up and take a stand of visibility. No more covering with euphemisms, or letting false assumptions persist. I am claiming the right that heterosexuals have to ‘flaunt it’ in the simple avowal of their relationships. I’m going to celebrate the joy that has come in the authoring, and authorisation of our new connection. She’s not ‘my friend’ anymore.
Liz Morrish
January, 2015