Naming under constraint: gender, care and symbolic power in family life – Psychiatry AI: Real-Time AI Scoping Review

AI Summary

Surname attribution is a gendered site of symbolic power within heterosexual family life, not just a private, consensual decision.
Naming under constraint: decisions made amid bodily vulnerability, institutional urgency, and unequal care relations become stabilised as consensual outcomes.
Delayed articulation captures the temporal gap between lived inequality and recognising it, showing care intensive stages limit feminist critique and intelligibility of injustice.

AI Summary

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.

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.

Basic summary

Front Sociol. 2026 Jun 17;11:1850315. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1850315. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

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.

PMID:42388717 | PMC:PMC13319052 | DOI:10.3389/fsoc.2026.1850315

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