From the Malditas to the Filipinas: A Socio-Onomastic and Feminist Perspective of Changing the Nickname of the Philippine Women’s National Football Team

Nicknames (or monikers) are popular in sports-related contexts. Sports narratives are marked by the frequent use of nicknames carrying wide range of social and semantic functions. Assigning nicknames to athletes and teams serve as important identity component and acting as symbolic resources that athletes, fans and teams turn to when defining and differentiating themselves from others. In this regard, nicknames come to convey varied meanings and interpretations understood within a set of contextual properties. This paper fills an empirical gap on discourses on the gendered nature of naming within physical cultures by illustrating the case study of the change of the nickname of the Philippine national women’s football team from The Malditas to The Filipinas, on the pretext of projecting a constructed idealism of Filipina feminism. The paper employs a socio-onomastic lens in understanding the gendered nature of chnaging the nickname of the women’s national football team which reinforces the patriarchal nature of Philippine culture and society, and the deconstruction of the new nickname through the continuous reference to The Malditas as a deliberate undoing of privileges of the patriarchal system in defining the Filipina subject.