this is the best theory joke that the universe has yet played on me.
I have a lot of disconnected thoughts about names, gender, the state, and culture. like: Murasaki Shikibu is a nickname based partly on her dad’s old job, we don’t actually know her personal name for sure, she was definitely a Fujiwara, but we don’t call her “Lady Fujiwara”. like: japanese emperors are never referred to by their personal names in japan, and after their death they are referred to by the name of their era. like: it’s not uncommon for monarchs to have different rules around their names than apply to the rest of the population. like: it’s also a feature of several languages and cultures to refer to certain people never by name but only by their relationship to you, either out of taboo or less stringent convention (see: most Australian Indigenous languages) (but also see: I’ve never called my parents by their given names in my life). like: I really enjoy that bit in Bodies that Matter where Judith Butler rips Žižek a new one for talking about names as a special form of sign in that they refer to one and only one referent and each referent has one and only one real name. like: nuns changing their names when they take their vows. like: women changing their names all the time. like: the Anglicisation of names of people from non-Anglo backgrounds, often arbitrarily and nonconsensually. like: the advocacy projects against “real name” policies from Facebook, Google+, etc, driven by women, trans people, abuse survivors, people who work under names different to their legal names (performers, many coders). like: the “same” name pronounced and spelt differently by region and era (Elizabeth, Elísabet, Elspeth, Елизаве́та, Ἐλισάβετ, إليزابيث ,אֱלִישָׁבַע). like: the “personality” and the coherent subject. like: the name as a tool of state control; the problems faced by people with inconsistent names on their official documents.
