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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