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The February Journal

Current Issue

No. 07To Be—Named: Across Borders

Published September 28, 2026

Issue description

Edited by Jesse van Amelsvoort, Gwyneira Isaac, and Tomasz Wicherkiewicz

Full Issue

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  1. This image shows a number of name tags showing the editors' names.

    Jesse van Amelsvoort, Gwyneira Isaac, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz

    Introduction: To Be—Named: Across Borders

    In this introduction to the special issue, 'To Be—Named: Across Borders,' we situate the special issue and the broader project of which it is part. Names are a key dimension to identity and a daily marker of how we personify our relationships with the world. They are what we call ourselves and determine how we live, move through our lives, and navigate the geographical, physical, and ideological borders that shape us. They are also how we are inscribed, documented, classified, and recorded by others. They carry ancestral lineages and traces of a mother tongue or heritage language no longer spoken, a language imposed by institutions or one being reclaimed, as well as cultural knowledge and traditions.  As a result, our names embody how we trace ourselves through our known family lines, how we are traced within our communities, and how we are marked, tracked, and followed by the state or government.  In this frame, names are also data: they must fit registries, passports, forms, databases, and technical standards that decide which scripts, diacritics, and forms are legible to institutions. Ultimately, they are highly personal, and, at the same time, they bridge our intimate social worlds with the complex and political ones. How is it, then, that we do not fully contend with what it means to be named, and also re-named as we cross these various borders?

  2. This image shows a Christmas postcard depicting red gift boxes decorated with white ribbon.

    Riley Rogerson

    Ill-Fitting Clothes: Names as Gifts and What We Do with Them

    Names are most often bestowed upon us in advance of or shortly after our birth, reflecting familial and cultural legacies and expectation as well as the tastes of those doing the naming. But sometimes the gift of a name is something that feels tight at the seams, restrictive in how it is prescriptive and out of line with one’s sense of self and subsequent experiences. What does it mean, then, to reject that gift and choose your own name, your own highly personal identifying marker, while you navigate the expectations of yourself and others? What do people assume about our names because of our perceived positionalities, and likewise, what do people assume about us personally based on our names? I chose my first name at age fifteen and settled on my middle name at twenty-one, casting aside the ill-fitting and restrictive clothes of my birth name to reflect myself as an agender individual navigating a world dominated by binary understandings of sex and gender. In this essay, I take apart the names I chose for myself, and the names others choose to call me, and reflect on the power held in naming and being named.

  3. The image shows a name tage saying "Hello. My name is... changing" as well as a transgender flag

    Celia Emmelhainz, Laura Emmelhainz

    On Choosing and Refusing Names: Gender in Transition in America

    In this dialogue, a father and a daughter consider gender and personal names in the United States, including the choices we make when crossing borders—in Laura’s case, when changing her name during a gender transition, and in Celia’s case, in refusing to change her name during the gender-inflected transition of marriage. The authors situate their memories and interpretations within the literature on personal name changes; the reader will find that their conversations move back and forth in time over a space of fifty years.

  4. This is a still from the movie 富貴逼人 (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1989), showing three people around a TV set, with one of them holding a video camera. A subtitle says ‘Daidi is playing cool.’

    Joey Chin

    A Situational Timeline of the Names I Go By

    This reflexive essay traces the changing meanings attached to names across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Through a personal and chronological account, it examines how names can carry assumptions about gender, family, culture, identity, and belonging. Moving across different linguistic and cultural contexts, the essay reflects on experiences of being named, renamed, misnamed, and addressed through different versions of the self.

  5. Abstract illustration of colored threads crossing wavy borders between three pastel zones, each thread ending in one of the author's names.

    Maria Bucur

    What’s in a Name? Mașa—Mași—Mașenca— Mașencuța—Doina—Doinița—Bucur— Deckard—Maria—Măriuca

    In this essay, I reflect on how the names by which I have been called have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped, my life. As a child of a Russian mother and a Romanian father, and later a migrant to the United States, the names I have been called and used to identify myself have placed me both inside and outside the cultural norms around me. My reflections focus on both the accommodation of and resistance to such norms.

  6. Illustrated cartoon character named Mr. Alphabet, built from three stacked, rounded rectangular blocks in red, teal, and yellow, each labeled with a large white or brown letter (A, B, C). The character has a purple round head with two white-and-navy eyes, rosy cheeks, and a curved smile, plus orange arms and teal legs. The bold red text 'Mr. Alphabet' appears below the character, with the smaller caption 'the friendliest letters around' underneath. Additional faded letters (Q, Z, K, W, X, Y) float in the cream-colored background.

    Tomasz Stanisław Bogdan Wicherkiewicz

    Adopted by a Nickname

    This reflexive autoethnographic essay traces a life through given names, surnames, name days, confirmation names, and community nicknames. It situates one Central European biography within the language politics of postwar Poland, examining Catholic naming practices, the marginalization of non-Polish and non-Catholic histories, and the symbolic dominance of Polish in the country’s linguistic landscape. Family surnames open onto Polish, Kashubian, German, and Jewish histories, while the author’s research connects personal naming with language documentation, policy, and minority-language advocacy. The final section turns to Wymysiöeryś, the severely endangered language of Wilamowice. There, a traditional kin nickname came to mark a long relationship with speakers and new speakers, and a form of adoption into the community after decades of research and advocacy. The essay argues that names are not merely labels: they carry religious authority, family memory, ethnic ambiguity, political pressure, and possibilities for belonging. Together, these episodes form an anthroponomastic curriculum of a life spent among minoritized language communities.

  7. A poster calling for people to vote for Jesse Jackson in the 1984 U.S. Presidential Election. In the middle of the poster there is a photograph of Jackson.

    Jesse van Amelsvoort

    Naming Errors: Globalization and Its Mispronunciations

    Starting from a visit with his father to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., this essay unpacks after whom Jesse van Amelsvoort was named and how his name changes when crossing borders. The past of the author’s name has been influenced by bureaucratic mistakes, while its present is marked by a very specific understanding of what names are internationally intelligible. Thus, the essay reflects on naming practices in times of globalization and growing multilingualism and transnationalism.

  8. The image shows an 1878 depiction by Settei Hasegawa of a woman playing the koto.

    Katherine Whatley

    Naming Music: Music and Sound Across Cultures

    What do you lose and what do you gain when you name something in a way that is legible across borders? This essay explores naming within the context of music and sound, arguing that to name sounds is to notate and make legible music. This essay’s author is a scholar as well as a koto (Japanese horizontal harp) musician, and the text examines the ways in which non-Western music, specifically Japanese koto traditions, are influenced by the Western notions of notation and cultural prestige, and ultimately standardization. Improvisation is positioned as a counter to this standardization as a performance practice that navigates the ‘unbridgeable chasm’ between history, the present and future, as well as named and unnamed sounds, and Japanese and Western music. Utilizing Christopher Small’s concept of ‘musicking’ to understand music as an active verb rather than a static noun, the essay advocates for the conceptual expansion of music to incorporate non-human soundscapes and animal acoustic cultures. In examining the disappearing regional dialect used in the folk music of Gujō, in central Japan, the author analyzes how naming is both standardizing and indispensable for preserving and reinvigorating local musics. Ultimately, by weaving together personal narrative, transcultural performance studies and critical theory, this essay calls for strategic incorporation of both legibility and illegibility, named and unnamed music, proposing that a composition can function not as a definitive statement, but as an ongoing question.

  9. This is the book cover of Constance Debré's Name, published by Semiotext(e) / Native Agents. The image shows a person's head from behind, with an extremely short haircut.

    Jesse van Amelsvoort, Joja Bos

    Debré, C. (2025). Name (H. James, trans.). Profile Books. ISBN: 9781800819870

    In this dialogic book review, Jesse van Amelsvoort and Joja Bos discuss how the novel Nom (2022, translated into English as Name) by the French former lawyer and author Constance Debré deals with naming and unnaming. In this book, the third part of a trilogy, Debré's autofictional narrator interrogates the historical weight of her name. Yet as she tries to renounce the familial, she seems to stumble into something all too familiar: known scripts, tired plots, and sexual clichés.