Men's name choices and gendered norms in couples
Line Grønstad
(University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
In Norway 12% of men in heterosexual couples make name changes, compared to 59% of the women. My Ph.D-project focuses on men and their stories about last names. My questions here are: What is male name change really about? What rules are male changers and male keepers breaking?
Paper long abstract:
Through qualitative questionnaires, around 100 male last name keepers and 60 male last name changers have given accounts of last name change in marriage, the meanings they attach to their own last names as well as to the last names of their female spouses and the last names of their children. Some married before 1980, when men in Norway were legally obliged to keep their last name and women were legally obliged to take their husband's last name. Others married after choice became the legal norm for both genders. Some men were not married. They spoke of future choices. However, the framework men make last name choices within consist of more than laws. Especially, norms of patronymy, i.e. the practice where men kept last names in marriage, women changed their names, and children got their father's name, were central. Norms of gender equality, however, made some men reconsider their choices.
In this poster, I will provide four themes that submerged from the men's stories. The first deals with families, both kinship and nuclear families. The second deals with tradition and understandings of the past. The third theme is gender equality. The fourth and last, deals with feelings of personal identity connected to the names. In sum, the men positioned themselves within each theme on two scales. The first scale was between a nuclear family orientation and an individual orientation, and the second scale was between a gender equality orientation and a patronymic orientation.
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Bad grandma: deconstructing the cultural stereotype of the storybook grandmother
Mary Cane
(Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen)
Paper short abstract:
New grandmother tropes are emerging in contemporary children's books. The role has changed as families have become geographically separated. By presenting my own counter narrative, I ask if there is a need to protect these idealised notions in communal lore or repurpose them for new contexts.
Paper long abstract:
A new grandmother narrative is emerging, one which presents questions of if, how, and why the family story is being passed on. The movement away from having nearby authoritarian grandparents to a culture of non-interfering grandparents has created the recent phenomenon of the distant but active grandmother. Enabled by technology and longer retirement, she may now engage with grandchildren in new ways.
In recent children's picture books, the grandmother narrative can be seen to be stereotypically romanticised. She appears as single, old, resourcefully living alone, somewhere 'other' with a moralistic pivotal role in the grandchild's young life experience.
Through interviews with fifty-nine grandmothers and reflexively drawing from my own experience I ask, is this what we want? Are there mutually agreed ethical principles that protect and confine the character of the grandmother? Are there narratives that are unacceptable to our notions of grandma?
My approach is to deconstruct the grandmother identity, releasing it from these boundaries. I offer a transgressive alternative and ask if it triggers satisfaction or disconcert, and to identify new social codes. I also ask whether there are unacceptable narratives that contravene our notion of what a grandma should be; whether there is collusion between writers, illustrators, publishers to protect this symbolic construction; and whether grandmothers themselves are trying to live up to or subvert those tropes.
In presenting my own counter narrative, I ask if there is a need to explore and protect these idealised notions in communal lore or redefine them for new contexts.
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Postvernacular language: Cultural heritage in Oulu, Wisconsin
Mirva Johnson
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Paper short abstract:
Since 2014, the Oulu Cultural and Heritage Center has worked to maintain their northern Wisconsin community. Since the community shifted to English-speaking in the early-1900s, the role of Finnish heritage has blurred the lines between both language and culture, as well as ethnic and local.
Paper long abstract:
This project grew from an initial, mutual interest from volunteers at the Oulu Cultural and Heritage Center and folklorists and linguists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in documenting the language of Finnish heritage speakers in the historically Finnish American community of Oulu, Wisconsin. The community had shifted from mostly bilingual Finnish-English speaking in the early 1900s to majority English speaking about fifty years later. While the heritage language is no longer used for daily communication, there was a gradual shift whereby the secondary, symbolic associations of the language became privileged over its communicative usage, reaching a stage that Shandler (2008) terms postvernacular language. Importantly, these symbolic associations are closely tied to material culture, music, and vernacular architecture, suggesting that transdisciplinary approaches to heritage language are necessary to capture the multimodal reality of heritage language usage and change, as well as its connection to cultural performance. This poster discusses the work being done at the OCHC and the ways community members are participating in and driving the reallocation of symbols of Finnish heritage to denote local history, culture, and language. Ultimately, a transdisciplinary approach spanning linguistics and folklore is necessary to capture the ways this reallocation blurs the lines between both language and culture, as well as ethnic and local identity.
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Climb the social ladder, raise a family – a life in brief lines interpreting the household daybooks by the mother
Åsa Ljungström
(Uppsala University, Dept. AnthropologyEthnology)
Paper short abstract:
Tracing feelings where they were not supposed to be seen, in the context of memories by the descendants and photos for presentation of the family in the 1890s. The recorder was the professional matron who became wealthy, herself the soldier’s daughter, raised her daughter to be a bourgeois lady.
Paper long abstract:
Between the brief lines of ten daybooks of household work (1890-1914) I trace emotions by the wife and mother Clara (1837-1914). Her family moved from a rural estate into a village adjacent to the local military cantonment. They built a house in the 1890s, taking part in the social life of the community, keeping the household ticking over, notifying each social call. As the parents got on in years, the daughter married. Disaster hit with the death of the daughter in 1913, leaving young children behind. With their mother’s death, the atmosphere of the home changed, as they recalled it. She left a void. In 1914, the keeper of the record passed on. The grandchild became my mother-in-law. She provided context to the diaries of her grandmother – with notes and photo albums from her uncle, d. 1967. She relived and told us of her childhood paradise. Tracing emotions in the perspective of class, I clarify Clara’s strive for social rise, creating a home for a middle-class family – the way possible for the daughter of a soldier, the handmaid who rose to matron and married the owner, inherited the estate, married again. Herself a capable, efficient matron, she raised her daughter to a bourgeois lady. Sarah Ahmed perceives emotion as e-motion, making bodies connect, descendants with grandmother’s narratives, reading great-grandmother’s daybooks, her photos confirming further interpretation. The stable, mobile book-artefacts connect five generations, space and time over a hundred years.
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