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I recently found out that our reigning celesbian married couple have now become as homo-norm as you can legally get – yes, Portia has officially taken Ellen’s name. They are now the DeGeneres’s. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, exactly. I can understand wanting to self-define in a way that reflects your married identity, but what’s wrong with Mrs. DeGeneres and Mrs. de Rossi?
According to BBC News Portia is keeping de Rossi as a professional name, to which I say – why bother changing it at all? Ellen and Portia are obviously the most famous married lesbians in the world: Portia doesn’t need to adopt ‘DeGeneres’ to define her, if you are anything like me you know and love them and the fact that they are married, presumably they know and love the fact that they are married, if she’s keeping de Rossi for half the time anyway why not just keep it full stop? Like, de Rossi is an awesome name, why get rid of it?
It’s irritating beyond belief when straight women today continue the old tradition of changing their names, blindly, as if it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Frankly, we haven’t reached the stage yet, gender equality-wise, where marriages are so equal that changing one’s name can just be a lovely custom, devoid of historical context.
Replacing your name with your partner’s implicitly supports a conception of marriage as an contract of possession – whereby the man takes the woman into his family as a nice looking bit of property. Protest as people might that they simply didn’t like their name before (my mother’s favourite justification), the fact is that assuming one’s partner’s name implies a dynamic of possessor and possessed, of one party’s control over what should be a twofold identity. The concept of the ‘head of the family’, the ‘man as provider’, and so on, really hasn’t gone away. Physical and sexual violence are still rife within marriages, and where customs uphold the sexism that feeds these inequalities, I reckon they need to go.
On the other hand, you might think that Portia and Ellen both being women alters the facts on the ground in some way. Like, if it’s lesbians it’s fine, right, because where there is no man it doesn’t matter who changes their name?
No way sailor-girl. Queer marriage is a relatively new thing, and people are still trying to shape it, and to make sense of it, and it’s not particularly clear to me that the adoption of another’s name, whatever genders you are, does anything to transgress or subvert. We’ve all experienced people insisting on viewing lesbian relationships through a straight lens: i.e. questions like ‘but, who is the man in the relationship?’ Worse, (and particularly infuriating if like me you can’t help looking femme most of the time), there’s still an assumption that the butch-er looking partner in any given lesbian couple is the dominant, manly one.
Listen, whilst my attempts at butch gender presentation can often be described as laughable, however successful they might be, I am not the man in the relationship. But neither is my (nonexistent) girlfriend the man – in my (not currently happening) relationship, there is no man: capiche? It totally doesn’t help that Portia is the ‘femme’ one and Ellen is the ‘butch’ one, and that Portia is the one changing her name, this plays right into the notion that the more masculine partner is the man.
Words are powerful, and where words characterise identities, they are doubly powerful. It’s amazing that in some countries in the world lesbian marriage is legal, and I stand up for the right of all people of all genders and sexualities to marry whomever they chose. But if we don’t keep our marriages queer, we end up assimilating into the very heterosexist dynamic that gay marriage should – if we are right to bother campaigning for it at all – transgress. And that kind of behaviour fucks me right off.
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