Naming under constraint: gender, care and symbolic power in family life

This article proposes a reconceptualisation of children's surname attribution as a gendered site of symbolic power within heterosexual family life. While naming is commonly framed as a private and consensual decision, feminist scholarship has shown that family practices are structured by persistent asymmetries of care, authority, and recognition. Yet the symbolic dimension of naming remains underexamined. Building on feminist theories of care, symbolic violence, and situated knowledge, this article introduces the concept of naming under constraint to analyse how naming decisions may be produced under conditions that limit deliberation and agency. Drawing on a case in Portugal, it shows how a naming decision taken immediately after childbirth-under bodily vulnerability, institutional urgency, and unequal care relations-becomes stabilised as a consensual outcome. The article further develops the notion of delayed articulation to theorise the temporal gap between living inequality and naming it as such, highlighting how care-intensive life stages constrain feminist critique. By shifting attention from naming as a neutral outcome to naming as a situated process, this article contributes to sociological debates on gender, care, and symbolic power, and highlights the importance of attending to the temporal and relational conditions under which inequality becomes intelligible.