Originally written June 2023
Since 2007 or 2008, I've spelled my name lowercase. It began as the appeal of poetry and linguistic rebellion but grew into something more. I made the change when I became an amateur scholar of bell hooks’s works, introduced and taught to me by beloved mentor Roslyn Farrington. May they both rest in power.
bell hooks took her penname from her great grandmother, beloved and indelible. hooks herself made her name lowercase her name as a way to emphasize her message over her name - honoring women’s legacies and placing importance on “the substance of books, not who I am.” Similarly, Civil Rights expert john a. powell spells his name lowercase in the belief that we should be “part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify.”
In “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants,” Robin Wall Kimmerer does the inverse, instead showing respect by capitalizing animal and plant names, as well as human names. She explains in a note at the end of the book:
“...This seemingly trivial grammatical rulemaking in fact expresses deeply held assumptions about human exceptionalism, that we are somehow different and indeed better than the other species who surround us. Indigenous ways of understanding recognize the personhood of all beings as equally important, not in a hierarchy but a circle. So in this book as in my life, I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple, Heron, and Wally when I mean a person, human or not; and of maple, heron, and human when I mean a category or concept.”
Another poetic writer, adrienne maree brown, offers a playful and blunt explanation about her lowercase name: “i like to self-determine what i capitalize? and lowercase letters are generally more aesthetically pleasing to me.” As a teenaged poet, I was aware of e.e. cummings and viewed decapitalization as an act of defiance against language norms (later I learned it was his publishers who made the choice). As a young queer person, I also loved k.d. lang, who bent the rules of gender, genre, and language. Once I got to college and connected those feelings to bell hooks’ Black feminist analysis of language, it became a natural and principled choice.
That’s when, about 15 years ago, the activist and artist in me converged to lowercase my name. The act of challenging “proper English”, the humility of no letter above another. This has proven true for me over the years. For example, stopping to lowercase my own name when typing reminds me to interrupt my own automatic thinking, which I hope also aids me in the lifelong quest to decrease my own bias and reactivity. As my economic analysis has grown over the years, “capitalizing” takes on a double meaning - I almost titled this “why I don’t capitalize (on) my name” - because I want to take every opportunity possible to dream into being a world where our names aren’t necessarily capital (in letter and in value.)
Now I look back and admire my youthful boldness. These days, I go easily to self-consciousness and internalized oppression. I fear people see my name as pretentious, signaling “wokeness,” or simply attention seeking. It feels similar with they/them pronouns, which I’ve also used since 2007. What is so true in my own soul is difficult to assert in public.
Aside from capitalization, my slightly atypical moniker means I can’t count the number of times people have asked about where my name comes from and if it’s short for anything. Whether I feel like sharing my birth name, it’s tiring to balance whether or not to educate in each and every moment - and I know I’ve got it easy compared to many.
As Jene Gutierrez writes on linguistic respect for bell hooks, “There is no ‘correct’ language, only thoughtful and careful language. Language informed by its history. Compassionate language. Language which invites rather than excludes. Language which, most importantly, evolves.”
My commitment is to evolve like language, and I’ll proudly bring my name with me on that journey.
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