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Twins

Talk

What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society

Dona Lee Davis

Ohio University Press Athens, Ohio

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davis, Dona Lee, 1948–

Twins talk : what twins tell us about person, self, and society / Dona Lee Davis.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2111-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2112-3 (pb) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4499-3 (pdf)

1. Twins—United States. 2. Twins—Social aspects—United States. 3. Ethnology. I. Title.

GN63.6.D38 2015

306.8750973—dc23

2014029923

Acknowledgments

The idea of studying twins grew out of my experiences in giving a series of lectures on embodiment, self, and society at the University of Tromsø in Norway in the 1990s. During that time there was a considerable controversy among the indigenous Norwegian Sami people and representatives of the Human Genome Diversity Project. The controversies whet my curiosity about the relationships between genes and identity, but in a way that was much closer to home—the home of my own body. A study of twins promised to offer some interesting insights into many intersecting planes of experience and analysis, among which are body/biology, personal/social identity, relatedness/relationality, and culture. The two-day research opportunities offered at the Twinsburg, Ohio, Twins Days Festival made it all seem feasible. After having done fieldwork among fishers in Newfoundland and northern Norway, I found the prospect of conducting a study in an area where I had an insider’s perspective based on my own lifetime of firsthand experiences of being a twin—of finally becoming a local expert—very inviting. Twins Talk as an exercise in quick ethnography was also developed as a way for my identical twin sister, Dorothy, and me to spend some time together. My intent at its most ambitious was to present some conference papers and perhaps an article or two. I had not anticipated how interesting twins would be to think with, and what started as a short-term project evolved into a much more involved endeavor.

As I became a twin researcher myself and became more and more immersed in the popular and scientific twin literature, I was put off by the predominating biological and genetic essentialism of twin research and the inherent pathologization of twinship or the twin relationship, most prominently in psychology but in other disciplines as well. Identical twins are variously depicted as clones, as a self and almost self inside the same physical package, and as a single unit or closed society of two. These characterizations seem to have minimal relevance to my own more than six decades of being a twin. What did resonate with my anthropological curiosity, however, were the contentions that identical twins are an unsettling presence that undermines a sense of uniqueness or challenges characterizations of selfhood in the wider (Western) society. My goal became twofold: First, to explicate just what those assumptions or characterization of selfhood were. And second, to provide a voice for twins in this process. Thus it is the intent of Twins Talk to quite literally address what twins tell us about the experience of being twins in Western society. And in turn, Twins Talk becomes a vehicle for comparing twins’ own narratives of their being in the world to the narratives of those who have made twins topics of research. In the process, there emerges a very rich and rewarding source for informed anthropological analysis as it intersects with multiple other disciplines.

Many people over the years have helped with this Twins Talk Study. I would like to thank the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Tromsø in Norway (now the Arctic University of Norway) and the Twins Days Festival Committee for their research grants that helped fund this study. The University of South Dakota (USD) Tuve Fund provided travel funds for Kristi Cody, the projects research assistant, as well as travel funds that enabled Dona to present papers at a number of professional conferences. Kristi Cody, an anthropology major at USD, was an enthusiastic and energetic research assistant. Sandy Miller and the Twins Days Festival Committee provided invaluable help and encouragement during the initial stages of this study. Angela Harrison successfully took on the challenging job of transcribing many hours of taped four-way conversations. Evie Clerx, Danielle Emond, Elizabeth Johnson, and, all USD undergraduate students, have also worked with me on this project. Thanks also go to Jane Nadel-Klein, Gisli Pálsson, Barbara Prainsack, and Elizabeth Stewart for their encouragement and support of the project. Of course, special thanks go to the forty-four twins who participated in the Twinsburg Twins Talk Study, taking the time to sit down and share their lives and experiences of being twins. I hope they enjoyed these conversations. I certainly did. Their stories helped confirm how interesting and wonderful it is to be a twin. Extra special thanks to my twin sister, Dorothy Davis, who played an essential role in the data gathering and attended three festivals with me. It was the first time in our lives that we had the opportunity to talk as twins to twins. Finally, thanks to Richard Whitten, my life partner, whose love and support I will always treasure.

1: Twinscapes

A Sufi teaching story tells of the holy fool Mulla Nasrudin who ventured to a strange city. Before he left on his journey, his wife put a sign around his neck with his name on it so that he would not forget his identity. When he arrived, he spent the first night at a caravanserai; while he slept, a joker took the sign and put it around his own neck. When the Mulla awoke, he was appalled to find his name tag on the joker’s chest. “It seems,” he cried, “that you are me. But if you are me, then who am I?”

—Lindholm 2001

Each individual is biologically unique.

—Pálsson 2007

What would it be like to have lived one’s whole life without ever having seen your own face?

—Herdt 1999

Like Charles Lindholm, I begin my book with a fool’s tale. Lindholm (2001, 3) places the Sufi story at the very beginning of his book Culture and Identity, in chapter 1, titled “Who Am I? The Search for the Self.” He comments that although the Mulla’s dilemma is “ridiculous,” it nonetheless raises central issues concerning the development of a more culturally sensitive or nuanced understanding of one’s sense of someoneness, or identity. The physical body, perceptions of self in relation to other selves, and self as positioned or situated and acting within a wider cultural milieu are all essential components of one’s sense of self (de Munck 2000; Markus et al. 1997). Yet, if you are an identical twin, Mulla’s “ridiculous” dilemma becomes a kind of double entendre. In the case of identical twins, the fool’s tale becomes real. There actually is someone else who is wearing the visual signs of your identity on their face and body. Twins’ physical similarities often result in others confusing, confounding, and conflating their self-identities. Moreover, for twins raised together, their senses of someoneness develop in a dyadic, coexistent mutuality, or sharing of place and space that actually begins before birth. It should come as no surprise that the academic literature, as well as popular imagination, depicts identical twins as living embodiments of two related questions: “What is truly other and what is self?” and “Is it possible to inhabit another person’s being?” (Neimark 1997, 3).

Situating Twinscapes

This is a book about situating twinscapes. Twinscapes refers not only to the visual resemblances of the surfaces of twins’ bodies, but also to their side-by-side appearance as a pair. This book is about twins who look alike and share space and place. As such, it focuses on twins whose physical likeness is so marked that their identities are easily confused by others.1Twinscapes as presented in this text also implies not only a view of two look-alike bodies but visions of hundreds or even thousands of twins attending twins festivals and performing their twinship for the gaze of others. Twinscapes as developed in Twins Talk also include identification and explanation of the various ways in which twins are subjected to the gaze of academic researchers as they in turn reflect popular or normative cultural ideals related to notions such as identity, autonomy, and mutuality. My aim is to go beyond the observations of researchers who objectify twins and view them as forever silent: frozen side by side in photographs, or reduced to their genes, particular body parts, or a series of testable independent and dependent variables. Many of the deeper questions of twinship, such as the possibilities of inhabiting each other’s being, of being betwixt and between, of being simultaneously unique and contingent, are raised in only a symbolically abstract or rhetorical sense (Farmer 1996). There is no voice for twins themselves, as agents of biosocial becoming (cf. Ingold and Pálsson 2013), in this research. How they, as twins, actively construct and negotiate their own twinscapes remains invisible, under the research radar, so to speak. As instruments or objects of research, even anthropologists tend to portray twins in terms of essentialized or generic cultural identities such as Ndembu twins in central Africa or twins in Haiti. Twinscapes, however, are actively situated or positioned within the twin dyad itself. In this view twinscapes illustrate twins’ own perspectives on themselves as twins in a “singleton” world. It includes the ways twins see how others view them and also their perceptions of each other. Twins’ views on living in and having identical bodies, on their twinship or relational bond, and on daily living with a cultural persona that is both lauded and ridiculed are not always in accord with the vision of twins researchers.

The purpose of this book is to show how identical twins, like the surprised Mulla, challenge commonplace notions of identity. Most books on twins deal with behavioral genetics, the psychology of twins, or how to best raise twins (Piontelli 2008); target audiences are other twins researchers, clinicians, educators, and parents of twins. As in the popular and scientific twin research literature, this book engages the biological/genetic and psychological/relational attributes of twins and twinship. Yet, when it comes to grappling with the “Who am I?” questions raised by twins, this book takes some innovative stances.

First, as the title states, Twins Talk seeks to capture the insider’s experiences of twinship. This study features and privileges twins’ own words about how they actively negotiate lifelong challenges raised by the “Who am I?” question. For identical twins, however, the “Who am I?” (as what is truly self and what is truly other) question hardly ends the story. Self-talk among identical twins also raises issues and questions of “Who are you?” “How are you me?” “How are you not me?” as well as “Who are we?” “How and when should I be me?” and “How and when should I be we?”

Second, I aim to present and analyze the positive as well as negative aspects of the twin experience that go beyond simple platitudes, such as “having a friend for life” or having a “special bond.” My focus is on the lived, grounded, day-to-day, and lifetime practical experiences and challenges of being twins. Third, if twins are a mirror of “us all” (cf. Wright 1997), then it is necessary to make the “us all” more explicit. If identical twins undermine our notions of a unique self, then what exactly is this unique self? In Twins Talk my aim is to subject Western culture to a critical analysis by comparing and contrasting the selving styles depicted in twins talk to self stylings across a variety of historical and cultural contexts.

Twin Research

Scientific perspectives on twins are at best ambivalent. Early nineteenth- century twins researchers (Cool 2007, 7) portrayed twins as both monsters and wonders existing at a tripartite nexus of horror, pleasure, and repugnance. Today, the fields of biology, biomedicine, and psychology dominate the scientific literature on twins. Issues of heredity, although going through a major paradigm shift, continue to dominate biological studies of twins (Charney 2012; Spector 2012). The older school of genetic determinism (Bouchard Jr. and Popling 1993; Galton 1875), viewing nuclear DNA as a blueprint for self, emphasized the genetic identicalness of twins as shared inherited traits rooted in or reducible to biology and little influenced by environmental factors. Emphasis is placed on sameness or being the same. Genetically identical twins in this modeling of genetic inheritance are referred to as clones (Wright 1997) or contemporary clones (Charney 2012; Prainsack and Spector 2006; Spector 2012). In contrast, the more recent emerging field of epigenetics (Charlemaine 2002; Peltonen 2007) focuses on heritable changes not due to structures of DNA but due to cellular mechanisms that turn genes off and on. Stressing genetic flexibility and adaptation, this postgenomic view focuses on inter-twin epigenetic differences—or what Spector (2012) terms twins who are identically different. Rather than differentiate between genes and environment, epigenetics moves away from the older ideas of genetic determinism and introduces news, more interactive ways of thinking about genes and their environment in terms of flexibility and adaptation (Charney 2012). Despite their differences, both paradigms present a gene-centered view aimed at discovering the hidden or subcellular life universes of twins.

If genetics reduces twins to their genes, biomedicine pathologizes twins by focusing on complications of pregnancy and birth for the mothers as well as the twins (Piontelli 2008). The twin relationship or bond is and has been a continual focus of twin research in the field of psychology. While their closely developed emotional ties or intense closeness (Klein 2003) may be celebrated as a unique dyadic capacity to understand and be understood (Bacon 2005; Piontelli 2008; Rosambeau 1987), psychologists tend to describe twins as somehow aberrant or compromised selves and as at risk for a wide range of psychological impairments (Conley 2004; Kamin 1994) and illnesses (Joseph 2004). Twins portrayed as genetically the same and as too close raise an interesting range of sociocultural issues about biological and psychological identity, as well as issues concerning autonomy and mutuality (Battaglia 1995a; Maddox 2006; Prainsack and Spector 2006; Prainsack, Cherkas, and Spector 2007). Like psychologists, sociologists are concerned with the development of a normative independent self and how the closeness and intimacy of twins may complicate identity both within the inter-twin relationship and twins’ relationships with the wider social worlds in which they live (Klein 2003). Anthropologists have tended to focus on twins, as a generic category, in terms of exotic attitudes, beliefs, and practices (such as ritual and infanticide) in faraway, non-Western cultures (Dorothy Davis 1971; Diduk 1993; Granzberg 1973; Lester 1986; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Stewart 2003; Turner 1967).

The notion that twins pose and encounter difficulties in the process of identity formation is as pervasive in popular culture as it is in science (Joseph 2004). Twins have been popularly portrayed as objects of wonder, fascination, and fear since the beginning of recorded history (Schave and Ciriello 1983; Klein 2003). Identical twins have been described as seeing double (Wagner 2003), as eerily similar (Neimark 1997), as “unwitting dancers choreographed by genes or fate” (Neimark 1997, 2), as individuality-burdened freaks of nature (Maddox 2006), and as a walking sideshow with four legs (Schave and Ciriello 1983). Twins are disparaged as having mutual or symbiotic identities, as being two halves of the same self (Neimark 1997), as being self and almost self inside the same physical package (Wright 1997), or as being a closed society of two (Kamin 1974).

Fault Lines and Deviant Persona

Whether characterized as an unsettling presence or exceptional exceptions, identical twins may be viewed as what anthropologists have described as a kind of deviant cultural persona (Holland and Leander 2004, 279) or as located on the fault lines (Conklin and Morgan 1996) of identity.2These concepts will become central to my analysis in Twins Talk. First, the notion of fault lines helps explicate the “us” and “who” as in Wright’s (1997) What Twins Tell Us about Who We Are, or what exactly is the customary order that twins cause a rift in (Neimark 1997). Identical twins exist on the fault lines to the extent that they challenge, confound, or deviate from normative expectations about self, personhood, and identity. Twins challenge natural assumptions that every individual’s body is biologically distinct and unique. For example, Herdt (1999) asks his readers to imagine what a sense of self would be like—as among the mirror-less Sambia he describes—if you have never seen your own face and only see yourself reflected in the faces of others. Yet, for identical twins, there is actually someone else walking around with “your” face and body. In addition, identical twins, in terms of their relationship within the twin dyad, also embody and enact a series of tensions or dialectical qualities of identity held to be characteristic of Western culture. In the spirit of Mulla’s question, “If you are me, then who am I?” (Lindholm 2001, 3), identical twins bridge dualisms of same and different, autonomy and mutuality, separate and connected, and self and other, as well as you and me and us and them. Farmer (1996) philosophically refers to this as a kind of symbolic double duality.

From a more practical perspective, twins have to live in a singleton-dominated world where their respective identities can become confused or conflated and their relationship or twinship, rooted in long-term intimate sharing of space and place, is denigrated more than praised. Twins are not only located on the fault lines; they live on the fault lines. In this sense, identical twins constitute a cultural persona as they collaborate to interactively microproduce and perform a twin identity and position their selves as twins (Holland and Leander 2004) both vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis the wider singleton-]dominated world in which they live. Mol (2003) describes identical twins as embodying a kind of fluid space where boundaries are not always demarcated and bonds between the elements (self/other) are not always stable. But stereotypical portraits of twins, passively embodying fluid space or existing on the fault lines, fail to see or incorporate an insider’s perspective. Identical twins are active agents in their own experiential worlds. As twins they interrogate, oftentimes rather militantly, commonsense assumptions of what it means to be a person. In so doing, they advocate and enact alternative models of identity, relation, and selfhood within the wider domains of Western culture. Twins’ own twinscapes provide an interesting perspective for consideration of how personhood may be worked through the body in thought and action as well as how images of the body serve as enactments of the social and moral ethos (Conklin and Morgan 1996; Csordas 1994). Identical twins offer an opportunity to examine a multiplicity of constructions and lived experiences of self and other in terms of intracultural diversity as well as in a comparative, cross-cultural context.

In writing this book, I am acutely aware that writing about famous or freaky twins sells books. Audiences and readers want to hear or read stuff about twins that confirms their weirdest stereotypes of them. I am frequently contacted by popular journalists looking for interesting angles on twins. Recently a BBC documentary producer contacted me to ask if I had any “really weird twins in my sample.” She gave me an example of two twin women in Holland who had never married and lived together all their lives. The filmmaker was interested in any cases I might know of schizophrenic twins or other twins who were abnormally bonded. When I told her my work was with normal twins and my goal was to normalize twinship, she expressed no further interest in my studies. In the stereotypical view that this particular filmmaker wants to pursue, twins are not straddling the fault lines, they have fallen over the cliff; they are not deviating from an established norm, but are beyond the pale altogether.

At the same time, however, twins are also a more common phenomenon. Globally, today, there are over eleven million identical twins (Spector 2012). Although twins are exoticized in many ways, most of us have firsthand, personal knowledge of twins. A friend, neighbor, schoolmate, or coworker may well be a twin or have twins in the family. Oftentimes, when I lecture about twins, someone in the audience will respond with something to the effect that “My daughter has three sets of twins in her elementary school and really, they have none of the identity issues you describe. All the other kids know who they are and can tell them apart. Really, it’s no big deal.” During my first in-class lecture on twins, a student raised her hand and said, “I’m a twin and really, I don’t find myself or other twins all that scary or creepy.” Clearly, day-to-day acquaintances and personal interactions with twins both normalize twinship and elucidate and resolve a series of identity issues for those closely associated with them. What remains unspoken and underanalyzed, and probably is not so obvious unless you are a twin yourself (as my student’s comment illustrates), is the active roles that twins take on, individually and together, to “educate or socialize” singletons on how to deal with the identity issues that they raise. Jenna, a participant in this study, makes this patently clear:

Jenna: There are more differences in twins than what people who are not twins just don’t understand. They think we look the same so we are the same. We’re not. We’re different people. And they don’t get that concept. I think it’s why twins zero in on the differences, because everyone else sees them as being so similar. We’re not. And people get us mixed up and I’m like, Hello!

Twins raised in Western society are like the singleton majority and different from it. Twins Talk is about how twins go about normalizing, expressing, and performing their identity and relationship vis-à-vis other sets of twins and how they utilize their twinship to reconfigure “normality” and navigate their own selfways (Neisser 1997), or characteristic ways of being twins in the singleton world. “Like, Hello!” as voiced by Jenna, implies the roles twins must take on as they challenge the stereotypes that singletons may have about twins. All twins do this. To the extent that they are together, they do it pretty much all the time. This I call self work (Goodman 2008) or self styling. Self work is a complex business because it involves both actions as individuals and actions as twins. Poised on or viewed from the fault lines, twins embody selfways that both integrate their selves into wider, normative selfways and mark them as deviant. Singletons and the dominant culture hold stereotypes or characterizations of identical twins that identical twins both buy into and challenge with their own counterhegemonic self stylings. In so doing twins also take an active and interactive role in the “process of ‘selving’” (Markus, Mullally, and Kitayama 1997, 13). By self styling I mean that once having adopted or established their mutual and individual identities, twins act to maintain the integrity of those identities (Neisser 1988, 36). Thus, being located on the fault lines, combating stereotypes, presenting alternative self stylings, while all the time “fitting in,” requires a great deal of self work on the part of twins.

Self working is part of the practical experiences of twinship, often noted by researchers, but never (Prainsack et al. 2007) investigated in any detail. Located on the fault lines of society, identical twins’ self working both confirms and challenges stereotypes and both bridges and delineates the dualisms of the wider society. Twins self-work as they go about answering Mulla’s “Who am I?” question.

Twinscapes and Cultural Psychology

Twinscapes are multifaceted, complex, and positioned. The concepts of self work, self styling, and selfways come from the school of cultural psychology. Identical twins, like all other humans, are both natural and social beings. Twins are not monolithic, and it would certainly be misguided to reduce them to their twinship. Their sense of personal and interpersonal identity and experience of twinship is, in turn, embedded in a wider sociocultural context that is also characterized by a great deal of diversity.

A cultural psychology3 approach works well in the discussion of twinscapes, precisely because it is so multifaceted and recognizes multiple points of view (Chapin 2008; Jopling 1997; Markus et al. 1997; Neisser 1997). Not only does a cultural psychology perspective allow me to integrate what has turned out to be a collage of chapters on twins festivals, bodies, bonds, and life cycles drawn from different research venues, it gives primacy to personal, lived experience (Casey and Edgerton 2005; Holland 2001). First, it recognizes diversity or variation between different cultures and historical periods, as well as variations within them. Selfways and self stylings are emergent. They are situated and participate within particular and multiple, sometimes contradictory, contexts. Twins are not simply a category or a uniform group. Nor can or should they be reduced to their twinship. There are substantive differences to be found among them—biologically, cross-culturally, and intraculturally. For example, when it comes to independence and interdependence, two key features of the twin experience, comparisons within and between cultures demonstrate that there are multiple ways to construct and express interdependence and independence. Additionally, a cultural psychology approach positions insiders’ views vis-à-vis outsiders’ representations of them. Not only does this book address twins’ and singletons’ views, it also takes into account twins’ views of singletons’ views of twins. Twins Talk shows how twins are acutely aware that twins researchers have a culture too. Second, cultural psychology recognizes the importance of the embodied, physical, and perceptual self. If a self-system is where the individual as a biological entity becomes a meaningful entity, then “identical” twins, whose very biological individuality is challenged, undermine key assumptions of self-systems. With highly resembling faces and bodies that are confused or conflated by observers or even characterized as clones with the same underlying genetic blueprints, twins’ self stylings and self work must start from physical baselines that are hardly familiar to singletons. Third, cultural psychology regards a person as not only situated in time and space but having a variety of interpersonal identities and participating in a variety of interpersonal relationships. Twinship, the twin relationship, or the twin bond is both praised and denigrated for its mutuality and is seen as having profound implications when it comes to nontwin relationships.

A cultural psychology approach also works well as a way of engaging the Twins Talk Study as a multisited study that includes participant observation at three twins festivals and two international twin research conferences, narrative data obtained during conversations with twenty-two sets of twins attending the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, plus my own lifelong experiences of twinship with my identical twin sister, Dorothy. By collecting data at festivals where twins celebrate their twinship, by gathering narratives from twins themselves, and by positioning myself as an expert, both as a twin and as a researcher, I view twinscapes through the lens of cultural psychology to compare and contrast twins’ perspectives on the twin condition to the perspectives of scientists who research twins. Twins are good to think with, but twins themselves never get to do much of the thinking. In Twins Talk my focus is on lived experience. Selfways and self work imply a need to get beyond thinking to doing and being (Neisser 1997).4A cultural psychology approach gives twins agency as they negotiate their identities, relationships, and lives in ways that simultaneously set them apart from and integrate them into the wider, normative cultural expectations. Twins rebel, adapt, and refine the “Who am I?” questions of twinship that in the twin research literature tend to be hegemonically asked and answered by nontwins. Language plays a critical role, and cultural psychology focuses its efforts on the collection and analysis of narrative. When pairs of twins talk about being twins, they present themselves as multifaceted beings in a wide variety of situations and contexts. They agree and disagree with each other, jump from topic to topic, and punctuate their conversation with caresses, slaps, tears, and laughter. The narrative data in this book invite an analytic framework that engages identities (the “Who am I?” questions) as enacted, imagined, negotiated, and embodied from the ground up (Holland et al. 1998).

Twins Talk is unique in the twin research literature because it seriously, critically, and literally engages the question of what twins tell us about ourselves. In Twins Talk, researchers come into an environment dominated by twins, rather than vice versa. When it comes to the twin research literature, twins are only a database; they neither get to determine and ask the questions nor get to provide their responses on or in their own terms. Rather than see twins as voiceless, passive objects of study, or as the carriers of “hidden” genetic codes, or as victims of “underlying” psychodynamic processes, and rather than reduce twins to a series of population-based statistics, a narrative study approaches twins as constructors of and actors in their own dramas. Narrative data from the Twins Talk Study come from sets of twins, in the company of each other, talking about what they feel is important about their experience of being twins. The data have an interactive, dialogic quality about it that is unique in the twin literature. It is the only study I know of that situates analysis in twins’ own twinscapes, which include both twins’ views of themselves and their reactions to “others’” (whether family’s, singletons’, the popular culture’s, or scientific researchers’) views of them.

Charles Lindholm (2001) states that understanding implies an imaginative identification with the position of the other. My advocacy of a behind-the-face, experience-near, everyday-life, and lifecycle approach, however, goes beyond an imaginative identification with the other. I am, so to speak, the other. I am an identical twin and my identical twin sister, Dorothy Davis, worked (and played) with me to collect the narrative data for this book. Rather than informants, we refer to these twenty-three sets of twins as our talking partners. As a twin, I take a culturally and experientially (Throop 2003) informed stance to examine the meaning and experiences of twinship among this sample of twins. My personal and interpersonal twinscapes are voiced in Twins Talk. Readers will find a strong auto-ethnographic, reflexive component to this study (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). To paraphrase Okely (1992, 9), the personal has become theoretical. Through this study I have found myself becoming a “militant twin,” one who both champions twins and twinship and resists the more negative or medicalized portrayals of twins and the twin condition in the popular and academic literature.

By comparing twins, the twinscapes of twins, and those who research twins, I further employ a cultural psychology approach to address tensions between self stylings within a cultural system. Culturally dominant forms of selving that are more recognized and explicated by twins than researchers do not occur in a power vacuum; not all identities are equal, and selfways exist within frameworks of social inequality and power relationships based on tradition and history. In the overwhelming majority of twin studies (see Segal [1999] for an excellent review of the literature), twins researchers study from the top down. Twins are approached not as people but as a population of study. Scientific researchers tend to objectify twins and reduce or condense the twin experience to quantitative data or a few variables that conform to highly specific research agendas. Twins, as located on the fault lines, do a great deal to make the cultural assumptions of twins researchers more visible. The often counterhegemonic selfways of twins are of particular interest because they challenge, transcend, and conflate many of the dualisms associated with Western culture. These include mind/body, self/other, nature/culture, normal/deviant, autonomy/mutuality, masculine/feminine, and perhaps most important, same/different. In this volume, I use twins talk to explore the notion that scientific researchers also have a culture (Lock 2005; M’Charek 2005; Pálsson 2007). Past and present hereditarians, biomedicine, psychology, and even anthropology could benefit from a more ethnographically informed analysis of twins and twinship. Western twins researchers admit that their samples come from largely middle-class Western populations, but share with many Western researchers the notion of the West versus the Rest, where others have a culture but we do not. They tend to take their own culture as a given. They view “culturally informed” analyses as suitable for “other cultures” but not their own.

Throughout and within the chapters of this book, I will compare and contrast the voices of twins themselves to those who research them. Except for Stewart’s (2003) prolegomenon for a social analysis of twinship, there has been little by way of an informed cultural critique or assessment that challenges as culture-bound many of the so-called objective assumptions of primarily Western twins researchers. This leaves twins researchers blind to the variation in constructions of self and personhood, both across societies and within any specific society, as well as to cultural biases inherent in their models of biological positivism. Moreover, in science and in the public imagination, identical twins have pretty much become the gold standard for understanding what is posited as a dichotomy between nature and culture, and twins studies themselves have come to define the nature/nurture debates (Conley 2004). Despite the alleged interest in nature and culture or heredity and environment, “environment” and “biology” are underanalyzed, as are twins as a biosocial phenomenon that in a variety of ways acts to fill up the spaces between nature and culture. The environmental anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1976, 105) refers to the “culturalization of nature and the naturalization of culture” as a way of bridging the nature/culture divide. Sometimes twins talk about themselves in ways similar to the ways of those who research them, and sometimes they do not. Unlike researchers who take their own culture for granted, twins reveal a great deal about core assumptions of their culture and are quite self-conscious as they do so. Twins talk does not reduce life experiences to a selection of testable independent and dependent variables. The response of twins to both positive and negative societal stereotypes of twins both bridges the exotic and the mundane and results in a cogent critique of society. It is my intention, in this book, to subject twins researchers, as well as twins, to cultural analysis.

••

This chapter started with Lindholm’s (2001) parable of Mulla’s “Who am I?” question. Mulla’s dilemma takes on a new meaning in the case of identical twins. What is a lived life like when there is someone who is walking around with your face—the primary identifier of your body self? Clearly, identical twins raise a host of questions about the embodiment of identity, the nature of human relationships, and the dynamic search for self. Twins Talk looks to twins to expand on the “Who am I?” someoneness questions posed by twins on the fault lines of person and selfhood. In the process of so doing, it is necessary to recognize multiple aspects of layers of self. Each layer of self carries different kinds of information and different challenges for twins. Jopling (1997), although not referring to twins, describes the layers as somatic, perceptual, motor, interpersonal, cognitive, moral, and cultural. It would be artificial to see these layers as fixed or in any way distinct from each other. As Ingold (2013, 17) notes, “Life is a process of making rather than an expression or realization of the ready-made.” Although my chapters do artificially emphasize different aspects of self, such as body, performance, bond, and kin, what integrates them all is a sustained interest in self work and self styling as enacted in the practical, firsthand experiences of twinship. Twins Talk will show (cf. Marcus et al. 1997, 15) that while cultural participation is never totalizing or uniform, that while self-concepts are not fully identical to the self they represent, and that although twinship confers a power to shape a twin persona, self and relationship must still be regarded as negotiated and enacted within a particular sociocultural context. Twins Talk, through remaining chapters, shows us that twins have a great deal to tell us about ourselves, as Westerners in particular and as bio-psycho-socio-cultural beings in general.

Twins Talk is a book about identical twins (unless otherwise specified, my use of the word twin refers to identical twins and not to fraternal twins), but it is also, as in the case of Lindholm’s (2003) Mulla, a book about “the relation between self and other and the construction of identity.” Situated on the fault lines of identity, twins raise a number of interesting issues about intersections between nature, body, psyche, culture, and society, as well as action and meaning. Twins Talk is not a comprehensive opus on twins. It is a kind of opportunistic and positioned collage that represents where the data took me. Chapter 2—“Talk”—focuses on methods and introduces the wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, venues for research, kinds of data, and diverse sample of twins that ground this study. It sets the scene for dealing with insider (twin) and outsider (nontwin or singleton and researcher) viewpoints or perspectives and deals with universals, as well as differences. Chapter 3—“Performance”—features twin festivals as rites of reversal, where twins become the norm and singletons the exotic other. In chapter 4—“Body”—we witness the complex identity stories of living in look-alike bodies that twins tell, and I contrast these stories to the lore of geneticists. In chapter 5—“Bond”—the twin-twin relationship as depicted as unhealthy or dysfunctional by psychologists is contrasted to the very positive evaluation and open-ended views of twins themselves. In chapter 6—“Culture”—we move beyond myth and legend to place twins in a more informed and dynamic cultural context. As twins talk they remind researchers that science is not culture-free. Chapter 8—“Kin”—features twinship not as a static phenomenon fixed in childhood but as a form of kinship embedded within other relational and lifecycle challenges. Chapter 9—“Twindividuals”—sums up by revisiting the “Who am I?” questions of twins and twinship and puts forth the idea of twindividuals as a way of addressing dualisms inherent to Western selfways. Each chapter provides a cultural psychology–informed analysis that interweaves the voices of twins with those who write about them in the name of science.

2: Talk

Discourse is duplex; it both enacts and produces culture.

—Quinn 2005b

What do they have to talk about? They are telepathic anyways.

—Maddox (2006), remarking on the sight of Twinsburg twins in conversation

Our best methodology is ourselves.

—Cohen 1992

If twins are “like two peas in a pod,” this is a view from the pod.

—Davis and Davis 2005

Twins Talk approaches twins as constructors of and actors in their own dramas. I argue for a person-centered, rather than a disease- or deficiency-centered, approach to twins and twinship. As an eclectic and multifaceted text, Twins Talk works from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The predominant practices, agendas, and biomedical positivism of twins researchers are compared to and contrasted with the subjective and intersubjective experiences as expressed by twins themselves. The former treats twins from the top down as a research method for testing specific hypotheses that are defined and delimited by twins researchers. The latter treats twins from the ground up and views twins as interesting in and of themselves (Cool 2007, 24). The former medicalizes, while the latter normalizes twins and twinship.

Whether I refer to twins researchers or twins themselves, I aim to follow the cultural psychology approach, introduced in chapter 1, to give legitimacy to multiple voices, to emphasize the situated and contextualized natures of knowledge, and to provide space for multiple and sometimes competing twinscapes. The Twins Talk Study represents what Gullestad (1996a) describes as a way of doing ethnography that occupies the interdisciplinary space between the social sciences and the humanities. As a scientific study, Twins Talk critically engages the scientific literature. As a humanistic study, it also draws freely on more intuitive and impressionistic modes of analysis. Twins Talk is not overly concerned with representative sampling or validity or the discovery of any ultimate or profound truth. Instead, it views knowledge, whether scientific or popular, as positioned and culturally constructed.

Any attempt to compare and contrast what twins say to what has been said about them must be harnessed by some centralizing, or focal, concerns. What integrates or flows through my critique of twins researchers or research, on the one hand, and the lived, experiential worlds of twins, on the other, is a sustained focus on sociocultural constructions of self. This includes self as a bio-psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon. The notions of selfways, self stylings, and self work have already been introduced in chapter 1. The crux of my argument is that in the process of accessing what twins tell us about ourselves, twins researchers leave as unexamined their own culture-bound assumptions of appropriate and healthy selfways. In short, these assumptions privilege a Western ideal of competitive individualism (Lindholm 2001). It is the hegemonic quality of this single selfway that so often places identical twins on the fault lines of identity and selfhood. In response, identical twins, as we shall see, must negotiate or self-work their own self stylings as they set about answering their “Who am I?” questions. Self work, as identities in practice or social action, not only entails how identical twins negotiate individual and collective or connected (as a twin pair) identities in a variety of sociocultural contexts and at different stages of their lives but also compares and contrasts what twins say to what has been said about them. This sustained focus on selfways, self stylings, and self work gives twins talk an engaged, face-to-face, interactive, experiential, and practical quality that is unique in the twin studies literature.

As the title of this volume suggests, this is a study of twins talk. As a study in cultural psychology, it privileges the collection and analysis of narrative data (Neisser and Jopling 1997). The conversational narratives that situate analysis and flow throughout the volume come from twenty-three sets of twins who attended the 2003 Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio. My original intent in this study was, with the help of my twin sister, Dorothy Davis, to interview as many sets of twins as possible in the research facilities set up at this particular festival. Yet being surrounded by thousands of twins for one weekend simply whet our appetites to learn more about twins, twins festivals, and our own twinship. Eventually, I would enter the world of twins researchers by participating in two international twin research conferences (Davis and Davis 2004; Davis 2007). All told, the Twins Talk Study is hardly limited to twins talk. It combines elements of multisited (Miller 2006), quick (Handworker 2002), experience-near (Wikan 1991), and reflexive (Behar 1996) ethnography. In what follows, I briefly describe the settings, methods, and populations for Twins Talk.

Research Venues

Twins Talk is based on anthropological participant observation fieldwork (LeCompte and Schensul 1999; Schensul, Schensul, and LeCompte 1999) at two different types of twin-centered activities or venues. The first type of venue is twins festivals. Dorothy and I attended and participated in three weekend festivals. One was the Twins Days Festival held in Twinsburg, Ohio, in the summer of 2003. Twinsburg is the queen of twins festivals, attracting over four thousand twins per year. At Twinsburg, Dorothy and I sat in a booth at the Twins Days Research Pavilion, surrounded by other researchers who study twins, and interviewed twenty-two sets of twins in two days. Yet participant observation often involves the unanticipated. Restricted to the research areas, Dorothy and I wanted to experience other festival activities. This inspired us to follow up on our Twinsburg experience by attending two additional twins festivals as full-fledged participants. We chose to attend two annual meetings of the International Twins Association (ITA). Dorothy and I participated in ITAs held in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2003 and in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2007. The ITAs are held every Labor Day weekend at different locations. Compared to Twins Days, the ITAs are much smaller (160 twins), more structured, and more intimate. These three sites of participant observation and research are further described in this chapter.

Besides generating an interest in festivals, the experience of sitting with Dorothy and talking with other sets of twins in the Twins Days Research Pavilion placed us side by side with other twins researchers. Although Dorothy and I were in Twinsburg as researchers collecting narrative data from as large a sample of twins as we could muster during two days, as twins, we could have easily offered ourselves up as data for other researchers (although we did not). The experience of being a twin researcher among twins researchers, as well as the subject of research among other subjects of research, began to tweak my interests in the field of twin research itself. I was able to follow up on this interest when I presented papers (Davis 2007; Davis and Davis 2004) at two international academic twin research conferences. These were the 11th and 12th International Congresses on Twin Studies held in 2004 in Odense, Denmark, and in 2007, in Ghent, Belgium, where I not only attended sessions and presentations but also got to meet and interact with a wide variety of twins researchers. These two conferences allowed for a firsthand, up-to-date, and comprehensive crash course in twin research, and by attending I learned a good deal about the twin research community. I did not anticipate the importance these conferences would have as field sites for the study of culture and for my own developing identity as a militant twin until I started to write this book after the first conference. What had originally been designed as a quick study of a sampling of twins in Twinsburg would evolve into a much more long-term and multifaceted piece of research.

Although they took place over a period of four years, these research events totaled no more than twenty days. Attendance at these large-scale public events, whether they are festivals or research conferences, hardly seems conducive to developing an intimate familiarity with those in the field or acquiring depth of data that is supposed to result from longer periods of “immersion” in the field (Josephides 2010; Schensul et al. 1999). This leads to a third and very important venue of research—me. Twins Talk is a view from the pod. As an identical twin, I have maintained a consistent autoethnographic and reflexive approach to my analysis. Dorothy and I were also interviewed in Twinsburg by our research assistant, Kristi Cody. Yet we are more than the twenty-third interview. As Cohen (1992, 225) writes, “Our best methodology is ourselves.” In this sense Twins Talk has elements of experience-near (Wikan 1991) and reflexive (Behar 1996) ethnography. I have a lifelong intimacy with, or firsthand experience of, twinship and of being an identical twin. My awareness and interest in intersecting and multiple, insider and outsider twinscapes are informed in part by how they form around and affect me as both subject and object of study. I have a firsthand and lifelong experience with the issues raised in this text. Attending festivals and conferences and working side by side with my twin sister, Dorothy, have challenged me to rethink my own twinship and twinship in general. My previous forays into the field of cultural analysis and medical anthropology have also provided me with a background to study twins in various Western cultures. As a medical and psychological anthropologist who has studied Newfoundland and northern Norwegian fishing communities, I am experienced in turning the ethnographic gaze on others (Davis 1998, 1997, 1983). My challenge here is to turn that gaze on a world that is far more familiar to me.5

Narrative and Experience: Finding Culture in Talk

As a cultural analysis of twins and twinship, this study is eclectic rather than comprehensive. Certainly there are many roads not taken. The book is rooted in narrative analysis and goes where twins talk takes me. Each chapter highlights a particular aspect of a twin’s own experience of being a twin. The famous Minnesota twins researcher David Lykken (McGue and Iacono 2007) was noted for his repeated comment that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” In twin studies, quantitative data certainly trump qualitative data. Yet within anthropology and cultural psychology we have a much greater respect for the utility of narrative data.

People apprehend experience and tell about the world narratively. Narrative has an interactive, intentional dynamic and is about knowledge as being negotiated, situated and conditional, and positioned (Bruner 1987, 1990; Garro 2000; Nelson 1994; Ochs and Capps 2001; Richardson 1990; Truscott, Paulson, and Everall 1999). Narrative can be viewed as a kind of self-location (Rapport and Overing 2000) and can reveal internalized sides of culture or an individual’s understandings of his or her life, motives, and identities (Quinn 2005b). Narrative may take the form of whole stories or dramas involving actors and sequencing of actions, goals, and scenes (Bruner 1990). But narrative may also include everyday, ordinary, interactive, shared and collaborative, conversational activity. Twins talk is a narrative in action and interaction. Our transcriptionist, Angie (whose job it was to record who said what), often cited in text notes that “you are all talking at once,” attesting that narrative can be free-ranging, haphazard, messy, and chaotic (Gullestad 1996b; Ochs and Capps 2001; Shweder 1991). Yet stories get told and, in the telling, selves and identities are located.

However chaotic, the rough-draft quality of narrative can air unresolved life events, where a moral stance or disposition toward what is good or valuable, and how one ought to live in the world, may be declared. Narrative is made in terms of preexisting categories or meanings. In Finding Culture in Talk, Naomi Quinn (2005b, 2) states that “Discourse is duplex; it both enacts and produces culture.” Going beyond generalizations about self and personhood allegedly consistent across all social situations, a discourse-centered approach focuses on specific social events, particular practices, and other types of social arrangements. The psychologist Jerome Bruner (1990) views narrative as a kind of folk psychology that keeps the uncanny at bay and renders the exceptional and idiosyncratic comprehensible. Festival twins as a special population or persona are located on the fault lines, deviating from conventional expectations of identity. They are celebrators of the uncanny. Through their narratives, twins draw on their own experiences as they formulate a sense of self. Yet their self-stories enact both their uniqueness and their shared commonalities with the culture in which they participate. Thus in Twins Talk we will see how confronting existing schema and airing doubts (Ochs and Capps 2001) may lead to a recognition of diverse psychologies, as well as explanatory theories or envisaging alternatives that reevaluate and reformulate what culture has to offer, and also how self and culture dynamically constitute each other.

Narrative analysis—as a specialized area of linguistics or cognitive anthropology—can be highly sophisticated and complex (e.g., Nelson 1994; Ochs and Caps 2001). Preferring the term talk over discourse or narrative, Naomi Quinn (2005a, 2005b) advocates the use of eclectic, open-ended, and opportunistic research methods. For Quinn, talk entails interviews that capture and record (for transcription) segments of speech or text that are longer than a single word or a sentence and that often tell full stories. In Quinn’s view, cultural analysis of talk can be done by anyone with the patience for close, attention-demanding, time-consuming work and an eye for pattern, detail, and nuance. Individual researchers may develop their own personal approaches, finding what works for their own purposes and inventing forms of analysis in the process (Quinn 2005b). Cultural analysis in this sense aims at finding patterns or clues drawn from comparison of multiple samples of discourse. It entails making explicit the largely tacit, taken-for-granted, implicit, and invisible assumptions that people share with others of their group or carry internally. Understanding culture through talk begins with the assumption that people in a given group share, to a greater or lesser extent, largely tacit understandings of the world that they have learned and internalized.

Yet Twins Talk departs from Quinn’s (2005b) design for talk research methods in a number of important ways. First, talk, according to Quinn, is collected through interviews or conversations between two people, one of whom does not belong to the immediate social world of the other. The narrative data from the Twins Talk Study involve conversations among at least four, and in one case six, people. Data come from a set of twins having conversations about being twins with other sets of twins. Being twins themselves, the researchers do share many key aspects of the relational and social worlds (not to mention embodied worlds) of those with whom they are talking. The data have an interactive quality that is unique not only in the twin studies literature but also in the discourse analysis literature. Second, the Twins Talk Study goes well beyond words transcribed into text. To reduce twin self stylings or self work to verbal abstractions denies the real-world importance of their bodies. I must admit to being amazed that, to the extent a cultural psychology approach assumes an embodied self (Markus et al. 1997, 13), the selfways, self styling, and self work of identical twins have to this point received no attention. For identical twins, the body counts, especially as they sit side by side, enacting, performing, and discussing being twins with another set of twins. Third, the festival context of the twins talk sessions is extremely important. Festivals are celebrations of twinship, and our talking partners come to the Research Pavilion hyped on being twins. Twins festivals are all about simultaneously performing and challenging popular cultural stereotypes of twins as being identical. If only for two or three days, a festival becomes a place where twins dominate, and singletons, with their biological uniqueness, become the exotic other. In the following, I set the scene for the Twins Talk Study by introducing the talking partners and some key features of the contexts of each research venue.

Inside the Twins Days Pavilion

The narratives that flow throughout and structure this book were gathered from a sample of twenty-three sets of twins attending the Twinsburg Twins Days Festival during the summer of 2003. Twins Days is unique among twins festivals in having space on the festival grounds for twins researchers who may recruit volunteer subjects from the masses of twins who attend the festival. Every year the research committee of the Twins Days Festival accepts formal applications from researchers interested in recruiting volunteer subjects. Researchers are vetted and selected through a process of formal proposal writing. If accepted, researchers are given official space on the festival grounds, for which they pay a fee. To an experienced field researcher, the Twins Days Festival is not only an exercise in quick ethnography (Handwerker 2002) but also a kind of ethnographic nirvana for the talk/interview component of a research project. This is exactly the point for all the Twinsburg researchers. Where else could one find, for two long days, large concentrations of twins representing diverse categories in terms of age, twin type, gender, ethnic identity, and so on?

The Twins Days Festival is held annually during the first week of August in the small town of Twinsburg, Ohio. Dating back to 1976 when thirty-six twins attended, the festival now hosts the largest gathering of twins in the world. Twins Days attracts twins—identical and fraternal twins of both sexes—and super twins (multiples of more than two) from all age groups and different walks of life. Since 1989 the number of registered pairs of twins attending the festival has numbered over two thousand. Twins Days is the predominant twins festival in terms of attendance, national and international attention, and press coverage.

Although more permanent facilities have been built since Dorothy and I participated in 2003, the Research Pavilion at the time consisted of a large tent with booth-like table spaces for twelve groups of researchers. Researchers are a formal presence and must follow rules specified by the festival research committee. For example, all tables must have skirts, and researchers are supposed to be in the same place from the opening of the festival to the close. In 2003 we and ten other research groups competed to entice twins to our table as they milled through the pavilion, looked over the research booths, asked questions about the projects, and decided whether to participate in one or more of the various studies. The research groups that year included National Institute for Deafness (hearing and listening abilities), the Evanston Continence Center (incontinence and pelvic floor problems), a university hospital’s department of dermatology (skin diseases and hair loss), Burke Pharmaceuticals (hair loss), University of Pennsylvania (sleep patterns), Monell Chemical Senses Center (taste tests), University of California–San Diego Department of Orthopedics (physiological conditioning and space flight), U.S. Secret Service (handwriting), Cornell University (altruism), and Western Reserve Reading Project (reading-related cognitive skills). We were billed in the festival program as the University of South Dakota’s qualitative study designed to collect narrative data to identify common themes of twinship. Some groups, composed of cadres of research assistants, processed and tested hundreds of twins. The larger, well-funded research groups come back year after year. We were free to participate in preliminary and evening activities off the festival grounds, but at the festival we were restricted to the Research Pavilion. We conducted interviews in the pavilion for two days from 8:00 a.m. to around 10:00 p.m. In the evenings Dorothy and I were the only researchers left in the pavilion tent. All the others kept a nine-to-five schedule.

A visit to the research tent was a popular activity for many curious and service-minded twins. The day before the festival, when we were setting up our research booth, I had a chat with a man setting up a booth to sell photo buttons to twins. When I mentioned that I was a researcher setting up in the Research Pavilion, he rather sarcastically wished me good luck, stating that twins “in the know” avoided the Research Pavilion like the plague, knowing that once they went in, even though they were promised a quick study, they could actually get stuck there for hours. Fortunately, this proved not to be the case. There was a steady flow of twins through the pavilion during each day of the festival.

Most other researchers in the pavilion had slick booths with big posters, banners, multiple researchers, and flashy technology. The majority offered some form of compensation. Researchers on big teams wore colorful matching T-shirts. Our booth, however, had a homemade or amateurish ambience about it. Dressed somewhat similarly in matching pants (which we had purchased independently) and in different-colored shirts, Dorothy and I sat at a booth we had decorated in red, white, and blue. We had banners strung across the booth that announced us as the Twins Talk Study. Our student research assistant, Kristi Cody, stood at one table, recruiting twins to talk with us, while we conducted our conversations at a table perpendicular to Kristi’s. While we interviewed, Kristi explained the study to interested twins, answered all their questions and concerns, and scheduled the interviews. Kristi’s outgoing and engaging personality and her public relations skills were instrumental in the success of our study.

Dorothy and I sat side by side across the table from our talking partners. Learning from our fellow researchers during setup time, we rushed off to get cans of soda, bottles of water, and snacks for our project participants. Since it was very warm, we also bought a small fan. We talked with twins through rain and thunderstorms, sunny weather, fireworks, and near one-hundred-degree temperatures. The torrential rains were a blessing because they cooled us off and brought twins into the tent. Large, collective festival activities like a group picture, a parade, and contests hardly affected the flow of twins through the pavilion. During the few lulls, we ate, drank, ran to the facilities, and were interviewed by the media. Apparently, we made good copy because we were twins studying twins. Despite the formalities of the application process, the structured and regimented layout of booths, and the intense recruitment of volunteers, the research setting was informal and relaxed. At times the shared laughter and the antics and stories of the Twins Talk twins would grab others’ interest and evoke comments from researchers at neighboring tables. Kristi remarked that other researchers would repeatedly ask her, “Just what are they doing over there?” There was also a marked element of the absurd to the research process. For example, we had adult twins who were waiting for an interview and dressed as bees. It probably was not what Allison Cool (2007, 7) had in mind when she referred to the twin research method as “when scientist and gene meet cute,” but it certainly described what happened in the Twins Days Research Pavilion.

Kristi dealt with the rejections from twins who had less enthusiastic views of our study. There were three areas where Kristi encountered difficulty. The first was with men, who were far less interested in the project than were women. The second area of difficulty, voiced most often by men, was that we offered no monetary compensation or gift packages, as did most of the other researchers in the pavilion. Other twins refused because they felt our study offered no solutions to medical problems or served no higher purpose. One set of twins demurred from participating because it looked like the twins being interviewed were having too much fun for a serious research project. After day one, Kristi felt she was becoming quite desensitized to rejection. We also had a problem in scheduling twins for talk sessions later in the day or on the next day because they would fail to show up. This problem was offset by the fact that recruitment was easy and missed slots could easily be filled by twins present in the pavilion. Not only did Kristi deal with rejection; she had to reject others as well. Scheduling an hour for each interview meant we were fully booked. Kristi also found herself having to tell eager parents of twins that their twins were too young for the project, which limited participants to age eighteen and over.

Conversational Interviews

In the Twins Talk booth each conversation lasted from thirty to ninety minutes. Interviews were recorded on tape and later transcribed. In two intense and exhausting days, we interviewed forty-four people and collected as much narrative data (over four hundred pages) as an anthropologist usually gathers in several months of fieldwork. Briggs (1986, 26) distinguishes between formal, structured surveys and more free-flowing and conversational interviews. Our twin interviews were the latter—a kind of interview where control is granted to the interviewee. It is the interviewees’ task to communicate what they know to the interviewer, and the explanations of the interviewee shape the interview. Dorothy and I were interested in and open to all responses the informants saw as relevant. Yet, although flexible and open-ended, interviews are not naturally occurring genres of talk (Briggs 1986). Conversational interviews still occur in a specific and structured social context. In our case, the specific context was the Twins Talk Study booth at Twins Days. Conversations or interviews may also be hierarchical or egalitarian. Egalitarian certainly described the interaction styles that developed as we talked to twins.

The talking sessions hardly fit the idea of a question-and-response interview. What is missing from the transcripts is the body talk, which frequently punctuated interchanges. This included twins forcefully touching each other as a prompt not only to say his or her name first but to take her or his turn or to correct or censure each other. These nonverbal exchanges, as we see in chapter 4, would emerge as an important part of the analysis. Language was sometimes colorful. For example, Karen referred to the time when “Mother nailed my ass to the wall.” Often it took both twins to make a single statement. This kind of positioned collaboration is illustrated by Donna and Dianne.

Dianne: In twins,

Donna: you know,

Dianne: there’s a leader

Donna: and a leaner.

Dianne: I was the leader.

Donna: I was the leaner.

Dianne: Lean on me.

Donna: I always did.

Following the lead of the Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad (1996a), Dorothy and I viewed our informational exchanges as conversations, and the twins we talked to not so much as informants or research subjects but as talking partners. For Dorothy and me, unlike our fellow pavilion researchers, our relative and hierarchical position of being researchers, as opposed to subjects, became secondary to our more egalitarian positioning of twins talking to twins. If there is one thing twins know how to do, it is to interchangeably lead and lean while sharing the stage.

When we sat for our first conversation with Chris and Carla, it was the first time in our lives that Dorothy and I had talked, as twins, to another set of twins. We had a lot to say and so did Chris and Carla. Yet, the Twins Talk sessions were not totally open ended. Although aspiring to a natural conversation, Dorothy and I had a set of guiding questions that we would raise throughout the conversation. Moreover, for the sake of the transcriber, partners were asked to say their names each time they made a comment or entered the conversation. Often this was an occasion of high humor with one twin reminding the talking twin to say her or his name.

The conversations were guided by a set of six key questions printed on flash cards. Revealing one question at a time, we worked our way through the interviews assuring an open-ended context but also steering at least some of the conversation around a preset series of topics, which I, as an anthropologist and a twin, felt would be relevant to anthropology. Topics included notions of embodiment, sociocultural constructions of self and identity, and notions of same and different (Rapport and Overing 2000). In many cases we did not even have to ask our questions. Conversations naturally flowed from one question to another. Sometimes Dorothy or I would interject the next topic when conversation lulled. During our talks, sets of twins frequently informed us that they “were just talking about the same thing last night with another set of twins.” Dina, who had recently received her PhD, commented that it was both a conversation and an interview:

Dina: What I really like about this was how the conversation flowed. It doesn’t really feel like an interview. There were questions, I know, but like, one question just blended into the next. And ya’ll were really good at keeping us in the subject matter; basically [you are] good interviewers.

When we went to the International Twins Conferences in Atlanta and Asheville, Dorothy and I were delighted to discover that our questions reflected the ways twins meeting twins converse with each other in more unstructured introductions or presentations of self and selves in casual social situations. Questions covered in the conversations were:

1. As twins, how do you see yourselves today as the same or similar?

2. As twins, how do you see yourselves today as different?

3. To what do you attribute these similarities and differences?

4. Have these similarities and differences changed over your lives? How? Why?

5. What, in your own words, does it mean to be a twin? Have these meanings changed or remained constant over your lives?

6. Tell us some of your favorite twin stories.

7. Is there anything missing that we should cover or is there another topic that, as twins, you would like to bring up for discussion?

Responses to our queries certainly illustrate what Luttrell (1997, 8) describes as a “narrative urgency” on the part of informants to define and defend their selves and their identities. The Twinsburg twins were well primed for conversation. That is what festival twins do. They talk, as sets of twins, to other set of twins about being twins. The twins who talked with us were quite positive about the project and certainly engaged in the Twins Talk Study. As an anthropologist who has conducted research in Newfoundland, North Norwegian fishing communities, and South Dakota’s Indian reservations, I have never experienced easier interview situations. Newfoundlanders, in particular, I found to be outgoing, witty, and articulate. They can tell great stories, but I feel strongly that the Twinsburg study was enriched by my being “one of them”: an identical twin.

During the interview, Tom, one of our talking partners, kept asking us, “How are we doing?” Tom declared that he had only “been rehearsing for this [interview] for forty-nine years.” We did not need to establish rapport. It was instantaneous. Our conversation with Tim and Tom started with high fives all around. Conversations were extremely informal. Judy and Janet began their talking session with Judy’s announcement that the length of the interview would be determined by the size of her bladder. The conversations were fun and regarded as a positive experience by both researchers and subjects. Our transcriber, Angie, commented that there was often so much laughter that she could not hear what we were saying. She wrote “Ha Ha” to indicate laughter. The manuscripts are peppered with “Ha Has.” I have left these out because there was so much laughing and giggling that transcriptions would have been littered with too many Ha Has.

Despite the casual informality and humor of the conversations, the partners also took the occasion to talk seriously. In what follows, Tom assertively takes on the singleton world:

Tom: From what I said earlier, I just think that when people try to figure out twins, and they’re not twins, I’m almost thinking they’ve got their own bias. You know what I mean? I think it’s reasonable for twins to study twins because you have a better understanding of the relationship, OK? Whereas it would be like a man interviewing a woman trying to find out what it is like being a woman. Or the other way around. . . . Because the sexes are so different, a man would never truly understand a woman, and a woman would never really understand a man. All we know is that we [twins] are different. Even though everyone has their own opinion about it, like males and females, single births don’t understand the dynamics of multiple births. Obviously!

At several junctures in the interview process, a twin would say something like, “Well, you guys know what we mean, because you’re twins too.” Usually Dorothy or I would ask for an explanation, but sometimes we were so caught up in the conversation that we would just let some of these loaded statements pass. Toward the end of Pat and Phyllis’s interview, Pat told us, “The best thing is you guys are twins, so you understand. As researchers, it’s really nice that you are doing this as twins. It’s a good idea.” Many of the talking partners are interested in the outcome of this project. I have sent them copies of papers I have presented. Response to the papers has been positive, and I remain in touch with a number of the Twinsburg twins. Those who continue to keep in touch are enthusiastic and interested in how the study progresses.

The Talking Partners

The talking partners came from an opportunistic sampling format. Although the sample includes women and men and shows some variation in terms of age and educational, socioeconomic, regional, and ethnic background, it is in no sense a representative sample. Rosambeau (1987) notes that volunteer twin samples almost always end up with a preponderance of identical girls or women. The twins talk sample is overwhelmingly female. We have no way of knowing whether those twins who refused to participate in the study, or those who do not attend twins festivals, would have had significantly different discussions on being twins. Certainly Dorothy and I had never been festival twins and continue to resist the overweening emphasis festivals place on looking alike. Nevertheless, the commonalities of our own experiences of being twins with those of our talking partners, regardless of age, gender, and class, amaze us. The sample, although small, is commensurate with other twin studies that feature twins’ narratives (Klein 2003; Rosambeau 1987; Schave and Ciriello 1983; Segal 2005).

Our talking partners could either use their own names or invent ones for the interview. Unfortunately for the reader, a number of twins had the same names. For example, there were four Ginas and two Karens. I have provided alternate spellings, not necessarily for clarity, but so that the twins can recognize themselves in the text. All conversations were two on two, except in one instance when we interviewed two sets of twins (Karan and Kim, and Cindy and Sandy) from the same family. The sample includes 6 men and 38 women who range in age from 22 to 77. Regarding education, the sample included 7 with a high school education, 3 with some technical or college education, 9 with college degrees, and 4 with graduate school degrees. The majority worked in business or sales (21), followed by teaching (8) and nursing (3). There were 2 social workers, 2 housewives, and 2 military personnel. The remaining interviewees were either still in school or retired.

In terms of life cycle stages, the sample seemed to break into 4 age categories. Those twins ages 22 to 26 were just starting out in careers and were not married. The 36- to 46-year-olds were fairly established in their careers, and at least one of the twin pairs had children still at home. The 54- to 58-year-olds had grown children and had begun to enjoy more indulgences, like vacationing and dining out. Those in the 61 to 77 age group were retired or approaching retirement, enjoyed their grandchildren, and spent more time together than they had since they were children. Chapter 7, “Kin,” gives the most detailed account of how the Twinsburg twins depicted themselves and what key experiences and challenges they have faced during their lives. The reader may want to read chapter 7 next to become more familiar with the Twinsburg twins.

Although this study features the narratives of the Twinsburg sample of twins, Dorothy and I were interviewed at Twinsburg by our research assistant Kristi Cody. Because we are the twenty-third interview, and there is a marked autobiographic or reflexive component woven into the text. Actually, Dorothy and I, with our different-colored shirts and different hairstyles, felt that our talking partners might doubt our identical twin status. We even brought pictures of us looking very alike at various junctures of our lives as proof of our twinship. Although eager to look at pictures and show their own, our talking partners never questioned our being twins. Instead, they said, “When we talk to you we know you are twins.” Our conversations with other sets of twins of all ages have led us to reflect on our own twinship. Initially, the Twinsburg study was to be the beginning and end of the Twins Talk Study. Like many ethnographic studies, however, it would develop unforeseen and much longer-term avenues for further research and reflection. These include autoethnography, performance, and twin research conferences, as discussed below.

Autoethnographic Perspectives: A View from the Pod

Early in her career as a twin researcher, Nancy Segal (1999), who has a fraternal twin sister, was advised never to mention that she was a twin because it would compromise her objectivity in the eyes of her colleagues. Fortunately, I, in contrast to Segal (1999), come from the intellectual tradition of participant observation anthropology, which not only gives legitimacy to multiple voices and perspectives but sees our best methodology as our experience of ourselves (Cohen 1992, 225). Twins Talk, as person-centered (Hollan 2001; LeVine 1982), experience-near (Wikan 1991), or a kind of interpersonal, minimalist ethnography (Jackson 1998; Rosaldo 1986), is certainly up close and personal. As written by a twin studying twins, however, Twins Talk also contains elements of what anthropologists call an autoethnographic, autoanthropology or self-reflexive, approach (Behar 1996; Ellis et al. 2011; Strathern 1987;Visweswaran 1994).

Autoethnography, according to Ellis (Ellis et al. 2011, 1), “is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).” Autoethnography is both a process and a product aiming to critique scientific ideas that include what research is and how it should be done. Grounded in personal experience, autoethnography draws on one’s self and one’s home as ways of bridging artificial divisions among the personal, physical, psychosocial, and phenomenal aspects of living (Rapport and Overing 200, 18). Being multidimensional, autoethnography is also sensitive to identity politics and recognizes that different people make different kinds of assumptions about themselves and the worlds in which they live (Ellis et al. 2011, 1).

For once in my career I am the native. I have firsthand and lifelong personal and interpersonal experience in this field of study. As the “others” in a singleton-dominated world, Dorothy and I have lived our lives in what Hastrup (1995) refers to as the contact zone.6If ethnography can be described as the “thickest form of information” (Ortner 2006, 10), in Twins Talk I bring my own lifelong, autoethnographic perspectives to the thickening process, filling in holes in the data, giving additional examples, and adding subtext to text. Although the fieldwork portions of this study include little more than two weeks’ time, Dorothy and I have over 120 years of living in the field.

As an identical twin, I have had the firsthand physical experiences of living in a twin’s body and intimately sharing childhood spaces and places with my identical sister, Dorothy. Hollan (2001, 8) suggests that one of the key problems for those who study the embodied aspects of experience is ascertaining how we can know that the senses, perceptions, and bodily experiences we attribute to our subjects are not actually the researcher’s own perceptual projections or preoccupations. Certainly I make no pretense of being Pete and Emil, Donna and Dianne, or Janet and Judy (or even Dorothy), but as an identical twin I have a firsthand experience with the embodiment of twinship that gives me my own perspectives on my body, as well as on what I see as a researcher’s own perceptual projections and preoccupations when it comes to me and my own embodied self as a twin. Yet, the Twins Talk Study is not just an exercise in reflexive anthropology or mutual navel gazing. Talking to other sets of twins and attending twins festivals developed my sense of being an anomaly, an “other” in a singleton-dominated world. It also provided me with a kind of stranger status and embodied standpoint with which to view issues of self and identity in the wider cultural milieu that assumes embodied uniqueness and privileges individualism by opposing it to mutuality. Thus, it is important to realize that being twins is but one locus (and a crucially important one) of a set of multiple and fluctuating loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those whom we study (Narayan 1997).

Although I admit to being an experienced interviewer, at home in my body, and having a longtime, firsthand experience with twinship, none of this mitigated the shock I experienced at my first twins festival and the sight of thousands of look-alike adult twins. Originally thinking of Twins Days only as a way to collect lots of data, I had no inkling of the visual impacts that the festival twinscapes would have on me. My (and Dorothy’s and Kristi’s) embodied, visceral reaction to perambulating multitudes of identical pairs would eventually figure quite prominently in the Twins Talk Study.

Performance

How persons enact culture or act on the world cannot be reduced to language and meaning. Ewing (1990, 253), who contends that the self is grounded in language rather than flesh and blood, has clearly never been to a twins festival. As I have already noted, conversations transcribed into texts or words on paper hardly do justice to the Twinsburg twins’ conversations. Talking about twinship as embodied is not the same thing as embodying it. Any analysis of twins in a festival setting must go beyond narrative, or talk, to engage embodied selves in practice and action, in terms not only of how meanings of self are achieved but also of how self or selves are put to use (Bruner 1990). Our interview conversations offered an opportunity to view culture as enacted or produced in moments of interaction that were nonverbal. Twinsburg twins, or our talking partners, sit side by side. They are dressed exactly alike. They link their bodies through held hands and mutual touching, be it stroking, caressing, or poking and hitting the other twin. They have come to Twinsburg to celebrate their twinship. Conversations offered a chance for twins to perform their twinship and put their selves to work. Yet the conversations take place within the purview of the wider festival and are impartible from it. Festival twinscapes are designed to shock and unsettle and festival twins take rebellious joy by collectively performing their twinship in ways that both confirm and challenge their stereotypes. A festival performance approach allows for insights into what “minds and body are doing as they are doing it” (Rosch 1997, 187).

At the beginning of Twins Days, Dorothy and I were standing outside the Research Pavilion with a fellow researcher. We were watching masses of identically dressed twins entering the festival grounds. Our companion, an old hand who had already logged several years at the pavilion, remarked to us on the sight of so many twins, “You never get used to it.” Initially, I thought of Twins Days solely as a way of accessing a good sample and collecting a lot of narrative data during a short period of time; I had certainly not anticipated the emotive impact of seeing over a thousand twin pairs. The sight of so many identically dressed twin pairs packs a responsive wallop that is felt in the body. At Twinsburg we witnessed twins being twins by the thousands. I had not anticipated the extent to which the festival would invite its own kind of analysis. The performance of twinship at twins festivals is a key situating context of the Twins Talk Study. For example, chapter 3 offers and situates many of the key arguments detailed in the remaining chapters. At festivals twins perform their embodied likeness and their mutuality or the bond that unites them.

In this participant observation study, not only do Dorothy and I negotiate multiple pathways among selves and others, we traverse boundaries between work and play. At Twinsburg we watched the festival taking place around us and also participated in the nighttime activities that were held off the festival grounds. These included officially sponsored picnics as well as unofficial parties at local hotels. We booked a room for the weekend in what was advertised online as the “party hotel.” Here festivities included socializing, drinking, and dancing until the early hours of the morning. Other party venues included camping sites where twins also could mix and mingle after festival hours. Feeling the need for a more experiential sense of festivals as participants and not just researchers, Dorothy and I decided to attend other twins festivals at public venues where we could be daytime or nighttime participant observers in a less formal setting. Attendance at two annual ITA meetings allowed us to participate in the full range of festival activities.

The ITA meetings are much smaller (160–200 twins, mostly adults), more structured, and more contained than Twins Days. Each year the association meets in a different place with participants sharing the same hotel. Although most of the participants are regular attendees and already know each other, organizers of the two ITAs we attended made sure that new twins were made welcome. The overall ambience was intimate, friendly, and fun. Although they complain about rising costs, most ITA twins participate in the total round of activities that are planned for all. These include dinners, contests, evening parties, and tours of local sights. Middle-aged and older women predominate at the ITAs, and men are few and far between. At the ITAs we discovered how much fun it was to meet other twins, spend time with them, and participate in the planned events. The first ITA meeting Dorothy and I attended was held at the end of summer in Atlanta, Georgia. We enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to return and take part in the association’s festivities held in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2007. My analysis of cultural performance and expressive styles (chapter 3) is largely based on observational data collected during public events at the three festivals.

Twin Research and Twins Researchers

When I began to conceptualize and plan this study, as in any scholarly endeavor, I set out to review the literature on twins. Since my master’s thesis was on biocultural aspects of variation in twinning frequencies (Dona Davis 1971), I had some familiarity with at least the older literature on twins. One of my initial aims in formulating the Twins Talk Study was to first identify anthropologically informed works and then move on to a comparative analysis of anthropological perspectives as compared or contrasted to the perspectives of other disciplines that were also interested in twins. What I discovered was that twin research itself has developed into an area of interdisciplinary specialization, with its own journals, research conferences, and hierarchy of researchers. The more twin research literature I read, the more sensitive I became to its medicalized view of twins and twinship and lack of interest in twins “from the ground up” or in and of themselves.

I am certainly no stranger to a feminist and culturally informed critique of Western biomedical texts and research methods (Davis 1998, 1995, 1983a). My experience in the critical analysis of texts, however, was a far cry from what it felt like to be a twin in the Twins Days Research Pavilion. The pavilion was a warm and welcoming environment where Dorothy and I worked side by side with other twins researchers. Yet, for the hordes of service-minded twins who came through the pavilion, Dorothy and I were the only researchers interested in what our partners had to say about their lifetime personal and interpersonal experiences of being twins. In the pavilion we observed other research groups who were interested in only twins’ ears, skin, bladders, hair, taste buds, altruism, handwriting, or sleep patterns, all as they related to their genes. We could hear twins gag as buccal smears were collected from the back of their throats. As the days went on, I became more and more sensitive to being reduced to my genes or even molecules, to being of interest only as an object of research. Like our talking partners, Dorothy and I found ourselves becoming hyped on being twins. At Twinsburg Dorothy and I found ourselves becoming “militant twins,” beginning to feel that we needed, “as the native,” to strive for a voice in the research process. I complained in a media interview, “We are more than just walking organ banks” (Barrell 2003). It began to seem that the Twinsburg volunteer twins might as well have been zombies or performing monkeys, given the amount of interest researchers displayed toward them as persons or toward their own perspectives on their practical and interpersonal experiences of being twins.

As the biologist Ruth Hubbard (1979, 47) states, “There is no such thing as objective, value-free science.” When it comes to issues of women’s physical and mental health, I am well aware that what passes for science or truth actually reflects Western cultural, as well as androcentric, ways of thinking (see note 1). A benefit of the cultural psychology perspective is that it recognizes that within and among societies there exist alternative or multiple constructions of self. Hardly benign, these constructions reflect power relations (Lutz 1990; Markus et al. 1997). My first twin research conference was reminiscent of my participation, with other anthropologists, in international menopause research conferences and my work as a consultant on internationalizing diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses. The difference was that this time I, as a twin, was the topic of research, and I was the only anthropologist in attendance. Actually, my original purpose in giving a paper at my first twin research conference, the International Congress of Twin Studies (ICTS), in Odense, Denmark, in 2004, was to be able to attend a Danish twins festival that was to be held at the same time as the conference. The festival, I learned only on arrival at the conference, had been canceled due to lack of funds and interest. My primary purpose for being there thwarted, I had failed to anticipate the extent to which my participation (by presenting a paper) in the Odense conference (and later at the ICTS to be held in Ghent, Belgium, in 2007) wouldprovide a body of data on twin research and those who research twins to be woven throughout this book.

Doing interviews: twins talk at Twinsburg

Babies at Twinsburg (photo by author)

Young girls at Twinsburg (photo by author)

Young women at Twinsburg (photo by author)

Midlife at Twinsburg (photo by author)

Elders at Twinsburg (photo by author)

Look-alike contest, ITA, Asheville, North Carolina (photo by author)

Look-alike kings and babies at Twinsburg (photo by author)

Two Amelia Peabody’s with mummy: anthropologists at Celebrity Night at the ITA in Asheville, North Carolina

At both meetings of the ICTS a positivist, biomedical, biostatistical approach prevailed. A preference for increasingly larger databases results in the collaborative combining of samples from different studies or data derived from sophisticated twin registries, which already include thousands of twins (Perola et al. 2007), past and present, and vast amounts of potential data. At the conferences twins are seen primarily as a research method rather than as a subject of research. Faceless, depersonalized twins, dead and alive, are reduced to numbers on a form, to a limited series of independent and dependent variables, which are assessed through standardized quantitative methods for purposes of which they had no knowledge when the data were collected. Highly sophisticated, large-scale studies with genotyping laboratories dominate the plenary sessions. More qualitatively oriented approaches such as mine lie at the bottom of the hierarchical heap.

The conferences not only provided opportunities to listen to presentations and be introduced to the current trends in twin research but also, through the lunches, dinners, social occasions, and bus rides to and from the events, allowed me to informally meet and talk with a wide range of twins researchers. Thus the conferences themselves, as public events, provided yet another venue for ethnographic fieldwork and quick ethnography. Additionally, aside from researchers, another major group of participants at these conferences are representatives of international mothers (parents) of twins organizations (such as International Council of Multiple Births Organization [ICOMBO] and Twins and Multiple Births Association [TAMBA]). Both organizations provide symposia on a host of practical issues that affect parents of twin children. Although one meets the occasional researcher who is a twin, twins are not an invited presence at the conferences. As a twin at these conferences, I began to feel like an oddity. Feeling a sense of distance from other researchers inspired me to consider putting twins researchers and twin research under the ethnographic lens. By the time the second conference in Ghent came around, I had a well-developed sense of being a participant observer at this public activity.

Again, to paraphrase Okely (1992, 9), the personal has become theoretical. The ICTS conference organization illustrates what Quinn (2005b, 1) refers to as the “harder sciences’ suspicion of anecdotal evidence and a false and unfortunate dichotomy between scientific and humanistic approaches.” For example, the abstract proposal guidelines included no category for the social sciences. At both meetings of the ICTS, paper proposals from the social sciences and humanities get routed to posters and, if they actually get to be scheduled in “sessions,” are relegated to small rooms and unpopular time periods. Like my analysis of culture in talk with the Twinsburg twins’ narratives, my analysis of those who research twins, the papers they present, and the texts they produce has an opportunistic style, rather than a methodologically rigorous style. Rather than see the science of twins researchers and twin research as truly impartial and objective, my goal is to expose and make visible, or more explicit, tacitly held (cf. Hastrup 1995; Quinn 2001b), culture-bound, or biased assumptions that are invisible to the largely hegemonic body of Western twins researchers. Thus I subject twins, as well as those who research them, to a critical cultural analysis.

My challenge to the hegemony of biomedically oriented twins researchers should not imply that I disagree with or dismiss the contributions made through positivist biomedical studies of twins. After all, the Twins Days twins freely presented themselves as research subjects out of a strong sense of service. Yet clearly the agendas and purposes of twin research are set and shaped by the researchers and not by twins. Twins as objects of study seldom have any input into the research process. My point regarding twin studies is that there is room for multiple approaches and points of view. Identical twins are “good to think with,” and insider and outsider twinscapes provide the gist for multiple avenues of culturally informed analysis.

••

After I had spent almost a year doing my first fieldwork research in a Newfoundland fishing village in the 1970s, an eight-year-old girl asked if she could walk with me from one end of the village to the other. As we walked, she told me about each household we passed. She commented on who lived there, what they did for a living, and how they were related to other villagers. This was no small task given the fact that most of the nine hundred villagers shared the same three surnames and that marriage among first cousins was common. Widowhood and remarriage blended families in even more confusing ways. Compared to my young companion, I despaired of my own lack of local knowledge, despite my anthropological training in kinship analysis. When I started fieldwork in Norway, my frustration was even more basic, as it appeared that the family dog understood Norwegian better than I did. Moreover, in my classes at the University of South Dakota, I have to repeatedly engage Lakota, who, often having been the subjects of anthropological study, are wary of anthropology and anthropologists. Although I welcome the challenges these situations offer, when it comes to the Twins Talk Study, I must confess to an unabashed sense of satisfaction that comes from finally being the “native.” I feel it incredibly liberating to be a twin and, like my young Newfoundland companion, to have that special insider’s knowledge from having been “born there.”

Yet Twins Talk includes much more than the view from a “pea in the pod.” Twins Talk provides narrative data that produce and enact culture, as do festivals and twin research conferences. The difference is that as this ethnography brings twins to authorship, it shows how Twinsburg twins, as opposed to those who research twins, seem far more aware of how the “Who am I?” questions intersect with Western culture. Researchers show an overwhelming tendency to take their own or Western culture for granted. Even non-Western researchers and researchers who work in non-Western settings view twins through the lens of hegemonic Western cultural traditions. It also seems that if twins are viewed as more than just a method of research, researchers tend to focus overwhelmingly on twins gone bad. At festivals and in life, twins confront and challenge hegemonic notions of self. They do so by normalizing their twinship and by asserting alternative selfways.

Just as the different field sites—the pavilion, festivals, research conferences, and my own body and twin relationship—offer divergent but overlapping perspectives on identical twins, each of the chapters that follow engages a particular twinscape.7Each chapter expresses insider and outsider viewpoints and perspectives. With the exception of performance, the chapters to follow reflect the different disciplinary perspectives that dominate the twin research community. These include biology and genetics, psychology, and the social sciences. Each chapter employs a cultural psychology approach that integrates the chapters and serves to compare and contrast the interest and perspectives of researchers to those voiced by the talking partners. If the purpose of this study is to add to our understanding of how twinship is a standpoint from which life is invested with meaning, the view from the ground up (rather than from the top down) offers a critical reenvisioning of what it means to live in our society.

3: Performance

Culture exists in performance.

—Hastrup 1995a

The stage is set for you!

—ITA Brochure for Nashville Tennessee, 2005

I begin this chapter with an introductory scenario.

It had been well over a year since I had last seen my identical twin sister, Dorothy. While on a weeklong visit to celebrate our fifty-fifth birthday, Dorothy took me to her yoga class. As she introduced me to her instructor, the instructor began to catalogue our physical resemblances and differences—just as if we were little kids. Even after years of living separate lives in different parts of the country and after spending very little time together as adults, we enacted what, in retrospect, appears to be a long embodied routine. We moved close to each other and positioned ourselves, at arm’s length, in front of the instructor. I put my right shoulder on Dorothy’s left shoulder; we tilted towards each other, leaned our heads together and smiled idiotically at the instructor awaiting her assessment. Although neither one of us realized it at the time, we were performing our twinship. Realizing an assessment was at hand, our bodies automatically moved together and our faces smiled widely for our audience of one. Reflecting on the event (and many similar on-the-spot performances to a widening array of Dorothy’s friends and colleagues), what I found remarkable was that we just did this without thinking. Our bodies seemed to act independently of any thoughts that this was a stupid way for two middle-aged, professional women to act. We must have done this so many times in our childhood that the act had become automatic. Because Dorothy has a dimple and I do not, our bodies came together to challenge the observer to identify the difference. We simultaneously satirized and performed our twinship by playing the twin game of “can you sort through the same and guess the difference?”

This scenario or depiction of playing or performing the twin game, or acting the part, demonstrates a kind of interpersonal, in-your-face self-styling that is crucial to the practical experience of being identical twins. For us, this moment of identities in practice, expressive styles (Ceronni-Long 2003), or acting the part took place months before we attended our first twins festival. Our impromptu creation of a twinscape, or our enactment of twinship, involved no forethought or conscious planning. Dorothy and I just did it. It happened with grins and laughter but without words. As jest and gesture among mature adult women, it was as idiosyncratic as idiotic. But it typifies a kind of self-work that twins do. In this particular instance, as we subjected ourselves to the gaze of a critical observer, we confounded her prefigured views of nature that assumed every person is unique or distinct. We invited assessment and comparison. Dorothy’s yoga instructor knows Dorothy, but she does not know me. As we took center stage, the observer looked for similarities and differences, thus confirming both our mutuality and individuality. Our distinctions became contingent to be assessed. We set the stage, as we performed our twinship for the gaze of the other; we also challenged her to do our self-work for us. As the conversation shifted back and forth between the observer and the observed, Dorothy and I took control of the education process. Our constant and exaggerated smiles and coordinated head movements alerted the observer to Dorothy’s dimple. We listened to the observer’s litany of differences until she hit on the dimple as the one that was meaningful to us. Acting the part, our embodied performance of same and different also expressed our connection and mutuality.

We have played this game before. It is part and parcel of the practical experience of twinship. It sets us as twins, the observed, in contrast to the singletons, the observers. As a playful act, the twin game also has a satirical edge that simultaneously mocks and confirms our own society’s cultural persona (Holland and Leander 2004) or stereotype of twinship as a deviant, or transgressive, kind of identity. This is true for the observer as well for us. She could easily have said, “One of you is blonde and the other has brown hair.” Instead, Dorothy’s yoga instructor chose to play the game.8The anthropologist Don Handelman (1990) would refer to our twin moment as a proto-event—an event that just happens, as opposed to an intentionally designed or organized activity. For Dorothy and me, the performance of twinship probably echoes countless times in our shared, brown-haired childhood when we behaved in a similar fashion. In one sense, it is an old habit of self styling that has lain dormant, buried during all the years we have lived apart. As such, it was a kind of performance that was improvised, created, or recreated in the flow of activity. Like models who pose for the camera, listening to the photographer’s constant mantra of “work it, work it, sell it, sell it,” Dorothy and I strut our individual and collective selves. This single incident of performing the twin game sets the scene for the analysis that follows. Our seemingly spontaneous and playful performance has an agentive quality in that we refashion ourselves, for the moment, in our own ways according to our own logics (cf. Szerzynski, Heim, and Waterton 2003).

Being repeat performers of the twin game, however, did little to prepare us for the combination of the specula and spectacular twinscapes presented at twins festivals. For twins, acting the part at twins festivals is all about having fun, making fun, and seeing and being seen. Festival twins create themselves as walking, talking, and embodied personifications of a deviant, culturally imagined type of self. As cultural performances and public events, twins festivals are a type of turnabout or rite of reversal where, for a couple of days a kind of full-blown pan-twinness rules. Twins become the norm, and singletons the exotic other.

Acting the Part

The dramatic potential of an identical twin pair has not been overlooked in popular culture. Twins sell products, twins can be actors or celebrities, and giving birth to twins has become trendy among Hollywood celebrities. We all probably have firsthand knowledge of at least one or two twin pairs. Yet imagine yourself set down among thousands of twin pairs. Our private proto-event becomes writ large, public and pro forma, at twins festivals where twinscapes are staged to include hundreds or even thousands of twins who gather together to play the twin game. Festivals are not just about one pair of twins working it; they are about twins en masse working it. Almost every state in the union has a twins festival that is open to twins and other multiples. Scheduled on weekends and announced on websites, some are held annually and some biannually. They are open to twins of all ages. Some festivals, like those in Nebraska, are attended by only eight to ten sets of twins, while the largest, in Ohio, attracts thousands annually. As organized public events, festivals include games, contests, parties, and parades. The media are always welcome at these events.

Performance

“Culture exists in performance” (Hastrup 1995a, 78), and festival twinscapes, where twins self-style as physically identical, pose a kind of in-your-face assault on the Western notion of individualism. Twins festivals as public events have all the trappings of carnival and spectacle. Whether or not you are a twin, twins festivals are a visually stunning and spectacular experience. Yet twins festivals are more than just about seeing and being seen; they are about seeing double. A large part of festival activity consists of a kind of Brownian motion of a seemingly endless number of matched people pairs. Identically dressed twin pairs mill around the festival and participate in contests, games, and parades. Twins festivals provide opportunities to investigate cultures in action (MacAloon 1984a) and are examples of society “cutting out a piece of itself from itself for inspection” (Turner quoted in Stoeltje 1978, 450). The public and an exaggerated performance of twinship at twins festivals offers some interesting insights into the components of a twin’s self, as well as twins’ selves.

While other chapters focus on biological and psychological dynamics and development of mutuality and identity within or inside of the twin pair, the goal of this chapter is to depict a more public, collective face of twinship. Festival twins become constructors and actors in their own dramas. They act out scripts and codes that directly and indirectly challenge the hierarchies or ideologies of self and personhood that discipline the world in which they live (Szerzsynski et al. 2003). At festivals twins perform multiple selfways, including their deviant personae in both a negative and a positive sense. Festival twins, who assemble at a common location to play with appearances and who celebrate and publicly perform their twinship, both attract and repel outside observers. By emphasizing or parodying their physical resemblance to each other, festival twins deliberately transgress conventional notions about individualism as naturally based in the distinctiveness of each individual’s embodied identity. But festival twins also celebrate different or alternative dimensions of human relatedness. They promote togetherness over autonomy. They revel in a sense of mutuality or connection to each other. Twins festivals may thus be viewed not only as statements of personal, interpersonal, and collective relationships and identities but also as embodied rites of resistance or reversal. In this chapter I use the cultural psychology approach (Markus et al. 1997; Neisser 1997; Ortner 2006; Shweder 1991) to examine how self and culture mutually construct each other, as festival twins cultivate a shared dyadic bodily aesthetic and a unique connection to each other.

Twins Festivals as Public Events and Cultural Performance

Performance theorists use terms like cultural performance, social drama, spectacle, carnival, festival, rite of resistance, and public ritual to refer to culturally designed forms of organized, expressive, collective social gatherings, activities, or experiences (MacAloon 1984a). Although I prefer the term festival, I will also follow Handelman’s (1990) lead by employing the more inclusive term public event. Although Twins Days is referred to as a festival and the ITAs are referred to as conventions, both celebrations of twinship fit the criteria for a public event. Public events involve active and interactive performances that are amenable to direct observation. They are real, discrete, and bounded events that take place at specific times and locations. As dramatic and expressive experiences, public events engage the senses (Handelman 1990). Twins festivals as public events are times of celebration and satirical high humor that give primacy to sensory, visual codes (Handelman 1990). As public events, mass public performances of twinship may be described as having a paradoxical quality. Festival twins play with appearances. Twins at festivals enact what Laderman and Roseman (1992, 9) refer to as “archetypal personalities.” Stereotypes of twins involve more than just being identical. By enjoying a festival’s events together, twins also express their sense of connection and mutuality.

Festival twins act not only to become objects of fascination; they aim to elicit shock and wonder. Public events may challenge social order or reconfirm the normative as they present alternatives and new utopian models of social reality or heighten awareness of multiple realities that already exist (Clark 2005; Ehrenreich 2007; Handelman 1990; Kapferer 1984; Laderman and Roseman 1992; MacAloon 1984a; Morris 1994; Rapport and Overing 2000; Stoeltje 1978; Turner 1984). Festival twinscapes offer a kind of identity couvade (Josephides 2010)—a chance to “freak the mundane”—where twins rule and singletons become the exotic other. At festivals, twins can emerge as weird and scary, if not threatening or even dangerous. Adult twins, dressed alike and meandering around festival grounds and venues side by side or even hand in hand perform a version of what Bakhtin (cited in Morris 1994), referring to festivals, calls the grotesque, exaggerated, or transgressive body (or, in this case, body pair). Twins performing twinship represent both structure and antistructure. They mock and they celebrate. They are betwixt and between—a special condition in the world that simultaneously embodies unity and duality (cf. Turner 1985). Twins invert the norms and override or reverse everyday distinctions and categories. The low may be exalted and the mighty abased. Another space is created (Lindholm 2001) in which festival twins not only perform a counterhegemonic act of resistance to outside moldings of their personality but also set forth alternative values and more relational styles of personhood, where twinship becomes desired, if not necessarily normalized, in the process.

Twinsburg’s Twins Days Festival and the International Twins Association Conventions

Although both fit Handelman’s (1990) criteria for a public event, Twinsburg’s Twins Days and the International Twins Association meetings are distinctive types of twins festivals. Twins Days, the largest and best known, draws twins and twins researchers and attracts extensive national and international media attention. Activities at Twins Days take place both on and off the festival grounds, but the main festival is held at the local high school. If not exactly Saturnalia, or a party when “anything goes,” off the festival grounds at hotels around Twinsburg, wild parties last till the early hours of the morning, and as our research assistant, Kristi, reported, can become so rowdy that the police get called to intervene and restore order. As one twin remarked to a reporter, “It’s not really fun until you’re of drinking age.” While the Twinsburg festival has the feel of a rather impersonal meeting of strangers or a mass event and media spectacle, the much smaller ITA feels more like an intimate, friendly social club consisting of an annual gathering of about 160 sets of twins.9The “wild” element of the ITAs consists of silly games and elaborate costumes. The ITA takes pride in being the oldest festival in the United States and changes its venue every year so that participants can travel to different locations. One participant told us that she preferred the ITA festival because it was “old faces and new places” instead of the “old places and new faces” of Twinsburg.

Although both are well-established twins festivals, each has a distinctive ambience that affects the performance of twinship and the configuration of insider and outsider perspectives. Due to its status as a massive, media-savvy event, the Twinsburg festival may be used to explore a variety of positioned perspectives of insider versus outsider views on twins and “being identical” across a number of dimensions that contrast the strange and familiar. The ITAs, which draw on the same core participants year after year and feature activities that include all attendees, are characterized by a sense of inclusiveness and intimate conviviality lacking at Twinsburg. While Twinsburg is family friendly, the ITA is more like a family itself.

Each festival has a similar mission. The Twins Days’ mission is “to provide a vehicle for celebrating the uniqueness of twins and others of multiple births” (Miller 2003, 5). The ITA describes itself as “one of the world’s most unique fraternal organizations organized by and for twins to promote the spiritual, intellectual, and social welfare of twins throughout the world.” A large part of the differences between the two festivals stems from the backgrounds, agendas, and expectations of those who organize and promote each festival. Twins Days is run by a small, full-time staff of singletons with the assistance of volunteers. Although both are nonprofit organizations, the ITA is a much smaller organization, and its festivals are planned by a member set of twin cochairs who are different each year. Twins Days does bring a substantial amount of tourist dollars into the town of Twinsburg and the surrounding areas, whereas the venues of the ITAs change every year. By and large, Twins Days is a massive event in which participating twins choose from a variety of events and find their own niches for participation, their own accommodations, and transportation to events. Nightlife at Twins Days is focused around nonfestival venues where twins stay, including campgrounds, trailer parks, and hotels. At the much smaller ITA convention, participants stay in a single hotel and eat lunch and dinner together. Twins take rented buses to tour local sites and attend organized dances and games in the evening. Almost all attendees at the ITAs participate in the scheduled activities, which occur from morning to night.

In terms of organized programs, the events are similar, sharing an emphasis on performance of identicalness. This is true even among fraternal twins. Each event has an organized program that includes registration and fees, interdenominational religious services, contests, games, talent shows, and golf tournaments. There is also a 5K race at the Twinsburg festivals and bowling night at the ITAs. Concerts, dances, and group photos are also important events at each venue. The Twins Days’ “Double Take Parade” marches through the main streets of Twinsburg. Both organizations elect kings and queens, while Twinsburg also votes for princes and princesses. Both the ITA and Twinsburg festivals have a series of most-alike and least-alike contests in which twins are broken down by age and gender. Few twins participate in the least-alike contests. Although Twinsburg welcomes both identical and fraternal twins at these festivals, it is clear that MZs upstage DZs, and triplets and quads are the biggest stars.

Why do twins come from all over the United States and beyond at considerable personal expense to attend these festivals? Certainly festivals provide an opportunity for twins to act out their twinship. Twin gatherings contain elements of the absurd and a carnivalesque atmosphere (Bakhtin cited in Morris 1994; DaMatta 1984). Both festivals play to the identicalness of twins and celebrate the joyous mood of twinship. Most twins come to Twinsburg or the ITAs with a sense of play and humor. Participants say the festivals are fun, and they look forward to attending all year long. Proud parents of young twins get to show them off while seeking and sharing parenting advice and frustrations with other parents of twins. Older twins get to relive and remember their childhoods together. As Mary and Martha say, “We get to play at being twins like in the old days.” Many twins have been going to the festivals since they were small children and now return to renew the long-standing friendships they have formed with other sets of twins. New friendships are also established. The festivals provide opportunities for twins to meet those who share common interests. As Amy and Beth say, “It is an opportunity to stare at other sets of twins instead of always having people stare at you.”

Festivals also provide an opportunity for twins now living apart to spend time together. Many festival twins we talked to said they typically see each other infrequently. Festivals provide a chance for twins to socialize, often without partners or children; but, ultimately, the festival experience itself is the big draw. The party atmosphere, especially in Twinsburg, also offers some twins a chance to get away from family obligations and cut loose. Arnette and Annette come to Twinsburg with all their grandchildren in tow. Pete and Emil, Judy and Janet, and Kim and Karan first came to Twins Days to celebrate the recovery of one of the twin pair from a serious illness. Similarly, some twins appreciate the festival as a way to reconnect when children are grown or a spouse has died. Some twins who have lost their brother or sister also find comfort in attending the festivals. Certainly to attend either festival is to capture attention, win prizes, and perhaps to have a photograph appear in a newspaper or magazine. Attendees may even attract the attention of a talent agent or be asked to appear in a documentary film. Attending a festival and being the objects of constant photographing, attention, and the gazes of others can make every twin pair feel like celebrities. Being special for looking or acting the same is what these festivals are all about. When Dorothy and I were on stage participating in contests at the ITAs, there were so many flashbulbs going off that I felt like an A-list Hollywood star posing for the paparazzi. The pleasure of a few moments of being in the spotlight, of working it for the cameras, of being the center of attention, and of sharing the stage should not be underestimated. It is a rush.

Positioned Perspectives on Multiple Selfways: Acting the Parts in Twinsburg

In this section, I focus on the public performance of twinship en masse at Twins Days, as well as twins talk. I doing so, I reflect an insider’s view. But twins talk also includes a twin’s view of the outsider or singleton’s view of them as twins. Originally, I had viewed Twins Days solely as an exceptional opportunity to gain access to a large sample of twins during a short period of time. Yet Dorothy and I, sitting in the Research Pavilion where we were surrounded by sets of twins, became as enthusiastic about the festival experience as our talking partners. One of our background questions for our talking partners asked if this was the twins’ first Twins Days. Unexpectedly, this question set a tone for talking about the festival experience at the beginning of each conversation. Twins talk in the pavilion was grounded in what was happening around them. What emerged in the Twinsburg conversations was a well-articulated countervoice of twins. In a sense, edgy expressions of twinship are an artifact of the Twinsburg experience. As formerly stated, twins festivals are about seeing and being seen. Even twins report being shocked at the sight of so many identical pairs in one place. As massive as it is, Twins Days positions twin participants against non-twin participants. Non-twins include the media, festival organizers, researchers, and those who provide services, including hotel accommodations and restaurants.

At the Twinsburg festival, Dorothy and I bridged the roles of researchers by day on the festival grounds and participants at night in offsite, unorganized activities. Kristi also supplied us with a constant narrative on a young singleton’s perspective of the events. It was very clear to us, moreover, that twenty-something Kristi’s experience of the after-hours revelry was very different from our own experience. Also, as twin researchers of twins, we had the opportunity to interact and talk with the media as well as the singleton twins researchers. Additionally, twins talk frequently engaged a multiplicity of perspectives that festival participation and performance of twinship en masse seems to evoke. As the cultural psychology approach views selfways as positioned and multiple, in what follows, I draw on the Twins Days experience to present and discuss a number of overlapping themes regarding the notions of situated or positioned identities and perspectives. When it comes to insider and outsider perspectives, acting the parts of twins can take an interesting series of twists and turns.

My analysis of acting the parts at Twins Days features three distinguishable combinations and permutations of insider and outsider perspectives, as they relate to the festival and to the participant twins. As a twin and as an anthropologist, I have little problem bridging the three different perspectives. The first is an insider perspective that describes how twins view themselves in the festival setting. It focuses on the enactment or performance of twinship from the twin’s perspectives and from experiences of the twins themselves. Here, the stress is on “doing” and the more visual, embodied aspects of performance. Doing centers on the existential, experiential enactments of twinship as unique, but paired, identical bodies. A second perspective entails an outsider’s view or how festivals and festival twins are depicted by the media, non-twins, and skeptical twins. Although festival twins are portrayed as objects of fascination, twins performing twinship en masse clearly both attract and repulse the outside observer. The third section joins insider and outsider perspectives and looks at how the twins, as they interact with other sets of twins, come to see themselves as insiders and outsiders at the festival. This third perspective also addresses how festival twins view the outsiders’ views of them. The discussion then moves from the idea of being identical as an embodied counternorm to an emphasis on feelings of mutuality and connectedness as an even more powerful counternorm that twins characterize as lying at the heart of the twin experience. When thousands of twins repeatedly perform the twin game for thousands of observers, an exaggerated version of the experience of being twins becomes enacted. Festivals focus attention on the practical experiences of twinship by serving to heighten awareness of self stylings and self work done by identical twins as located on fault lines or borderlands of identity.

Insider’s View: The Actors

At twins festivals, twins play the twin game. They perform or enact the cultural persona of twinship or society’s stereotypical caricature of them. “Getting into the festival spirit” entails being identical. Although the phrase “seeing double” seems trite, it captures the essence of twins festivals. Looking as alike as possible is the performance goal of most of the twin pairs at Twins Days. Adult twins—identical and fraternal, young and old, male and female—who were never dressed alike or have not dressed alike for years, make a great effort to present themselves in ways that enact stereotypes about them as identical. It is not just about bodies; it is also about trappings on the body. Dressing identically becomes a kind of body art. It should hold up from first casual glance to a more detailed scrutiny and assessment of how alike a twin pair looks. Many twins pay painstaking attention to detail, matching earrings, pocketbooks, makeup, nail polish, glasses, and hairstyles. The idea here is to celebrate, or relive twinship, and to have fun.

There are plenty of adorable children dressed identically who receive the “oohs” and “aahs” of onlookers. Some children are dressed in identical T-shirts emblazoned with phrases such as “It’s a twin thing,” “Like two peas in a pod,” and “If no two snowflakes are alike, then I’m glad we’re not snowflakes.” There are also adults who walk around in T-shirts that proclaim their twin status with the word twin written across their chests. Their identical T-shirts bear messages such as “Double Trouble,” “Born Together,” “Look out, there’s two of me,” “Clones,” “I’m the evil twin,” “It must have been my evil twin,” and the classic “I’m with stupid.” Adult T-shirts also reflect relational themes such as “Friends Forever,” “It’s a twin thing / you wouldn’t understand,” and “I’m smiling because you’re my sister / and I’m laughing because there is nothing you can do about it.” A carnivalesque sense of high humor and a sense of challenging, bending, or breaking singleton norms and rules predominate. Twins can even replicate their replicate selves, with each twin wearing a photo button of their twin pair in the same place on their bodies. All this can get confusing, which is exactly the point. Jeana and Dina told us how the photographers coached them on how to look alike for their button pictures. They went through (and paid for) many takes before they got a photograph that suited them both.

The effect of twins festivals is well depicted as “uncanny.” Ironically, one’s sense of being unique and special as a pair of twins is both enhanced and muted as one is surrounded by twins by the dozens. Some festival twins develop expressive self styling or personae that make them stand out among the thousands of sets of twins that surround them. At Twinsburg Dorothy, Kristi, and I began referring to sets of high-profile twins (those who stood out) with identifying labels like the Fabio twins, the Parrot twins, the Harley twins, the Kings, the Playgirl and Playboy twins, the Cowgirl twins (in Western outfits) and the Cow girl twins (in cow suits), the Doctor twins, and the twins on The Simpsons. Talking with ITA twins who had also attended the Twinsburg festival, we found other sets of twins had come up with the same labels. Some twins dress like a famous celebrity. At Twinsburg, twin sisters dressed like Dolly Parton. In their case, my own sense of reality was suspended. Initially, I thought they were over-the-top, rural southern throwbacks to the 1950s, but Dorothy and Kristi convinced me they were in costume.

Although the websites and promotional materials for Twinsburg note that it is not necessary to dress alike, attendees are advised that most twins get into the festival spirit by dressing alike. Jenna and Steph, identical twins in their early forties (who do not look much alike and regard themselves as “complete opposites”), told us that they had arrived for their first time at Twinsburg with no similar clothes. They felt like pariahs on the first day because they felt that no one would talk to them. On day two, they bought identical festival T-shirts and said they fit in then, entering conversations and making friends with other twins. Deciding to dress in similar clothes but in different colors, Dorothy and I also felt like outsiders among the mass of pairs at Twinsburg. We had the impression that our decision to wear essentially the same clothes but in different colors (as our mother often had dressed us in later childhood) was a cop-out. Having different hairstyles and hair color (dyed) also marked us as not in the spirit of the festival. At Twinsburg we were constantly advised that identical baseball caps would be a simple and quick fix to the hair problem.

The appeal of dressing alike and participating in contests, however, can become strangely addictive, as Dina and Jeana explain.

Dina: I planned this whole vacation. Jeana had no idea. I told her we were in the parade. It was fun. I like this whole twin fest thing because we’ve learned so much. Next year I want to come back in costumes like other people were doing and throw out candy. During the parade it was funny because I like waving to people; it’s like I’m saying, “Thank you for supporting us twins.”

Jeana: We’re going to have to plan next year. We’ve learned and lived through this one. Next year will be even better. What we’ve found interesting is how much we desire to look alike now, whereas before it was like, well, OK, we look similar. We went to a restaurant where the waiter said, “I would never have guessed you were twins.” I mean that, like, hurt. In high school we tried so hard not to look alike. Now we want to look alike.

After their first time at Twins Days, Jeana and Dina planned to dedicate more planning and effort to dressing exactly alike for the festival. They have become socialized by the festival experience to dress alike “with attitude” for Twins Days. Three years after we first met them, Pete and Emil sent me an article from their local newspaper that announced they had finally won the look-alike award for their age category at Twinsburg. They were also proud to have finally won, at age eighty, recognition for being the third-oldest twins at Twins Days in 2004. Annette and Arnette are two middle-aged women who describe themselves as “Twins Days regulars.” They have attended the festival for eight consecutive years. When they competed in their first festival look-alike contest, Arnette was over sixty pounds heavier than Annette. After the first festival, Arnette was inspired to lose the extra weight so they would look more alike for future contests. Twins who attend twins festivals are enthusiastic performers of an envisioned twin persona. At festivals, twins become the norm as look-alike twins of all ages dominate the peoplescape. By performing identical or sameness, twins place themselves at odds with Western society’s notions of independence, autonomy, and individuality. This becomes clear when we take into account the views of the media and singletons.

Outsider’s View: An Audience of Singletons

Because twins dominate the peoplescape in Twinsburg, they provide a dramatic twinscape for outsiders who attend the festival. Outsiders are singletons who include researchers, reporters, spouses, siblings, parents, children, friends of twins, service or sales personnel, and the general public who watch the parades and contests. Reporters, feature writers, filmmakers, and photographers from all over the world descend on the Twins Days Festival. Outsiders’ views of festival twins can be ambivalent. Festivals are designed to shock and unsettle and, as public events (Handelman 1990), twins festivals give primacy to sensory visual codes. If a pair of twins can be described as “dramatically visible” and a “fascinating condition of humanity” (Wright 1997, 110), then what effect does the sight of thousands of pairs of twins have? Wright’s (1997) depiction of identical twins as an unsettling presence in the world well captures the singleton, outsider’s experience of twins festivals. Our research assistant, Kristi Cody (2004, 14), felt visually assaulted by the sight of so many twins. Kristi reports that she was “totally freaked” by Twins Days and claims, “It was like entering an episode of the X Files.” Journalist Tony Barrell (2003, 22) writes of Twins Days that the casual observer “is at risk of flipping out when they see all these human carbon copies.” Like Barrell, reporters have a field day with word play as they describe the impacts of seeing so many twins together. Their prose is peppered by references to “seeing double,” “double vision,” “double trouble,” “double the interest,” “two heads are better than one,” “freaks with four legs,” “queues of twos,” “doppelgangers,” “seeing double without the penalty of a hangover,” and so forth.

Seeing thousands of twins is a kind of assault on the senses and conflicts with the idea that one’s face should reflect one’s distinctiveness, or personal identity. Twins in this sense are weird and scary to the outsider, if not threatening or even dangerous. But the unsettling effect grows with the age of the twins. The anthropological literature on twins indicates that identical twins lose any of their culturally elaborated distinctiveness after childhood (Dorothy Davis 1971; Stewart 2003). Yet at Twinsburg, over 30 percent of twins registered for the festival are over twenty-one years old (Miller 2003). As Kristi told us, “The little kids are really cute, but for adults it’s kind of sick. They [identical adults] need to get a life.” Likewise, Bacon (2005) notes that while identically dressed babies are seen as a delight, identically dressed adults are not. In our society identically dressed adults will be stigmatized. Piontelli (2008, 219) has this to say about adult female twins who continue to dress alike.

Although doppelganger behavior elicits the attention of passers-by, it makes adults appear freakish or pathetic, just like the fading stars in “Sunset Boulevard” who try uselessly to hang on to their withered glory.

For singletons it appears that the face is a sort of label for a distinctiveness that lies within. If identical twins complement their like faces with identical outfits, the singleton observer suspects that the self may somehow be divided, diluted, or duplicated. If personal identities can be conflated, the self, especially at adulthood, is therefore impaired.

At festivals, as twins revel in dressing alike and surrender themselves to the pair, there is certainly a sense of what Bakhtin refers to as the exaggerated or grotesque body (Morris 1994). Although Bakhtin was describing the clowns of early medieval festivals, his depiction of the grotesque body as not individualized, as open, as having a double aspect, and as a kind of co-being that implies self/other interaction, certainly describes the twinscapes at modern-day festivals. Because they subvert normative expectations of unique identity, because the low are exalted, and because the freaks become the norm, twins festivals can be viewed as rites of inversion.

This perspective of the grotesque body and co-being is well verbalized by Maddox (2006, 66), a popular science writer who wrote a negative commentary about the 2005 Twinsburg festival. Portraying the festival, with its “muted horrors of pan-Twinism,” as exemplifying the dark side or doomsday scenario of a future world populated by clones, Maddox (2006, 66) refers to the twin participants as “deeply creeping me out with their mutual bodies.” He depicts twins as clones “without souls,” “without their own identities,” who will “never know the quintessential joy of feeling different.” Maddox also extends his distaste of what he sees as the biological duplication of one’s self to the twin’s relationship or what he terms the twin “love factor.” Maddox describes the Twinsburg twins who perambulate the festival grounds dressed alike and arm in arm as “existential puzzles,” with one twin knowing exactly what the other is going through and with a twin loving the other twin “arguably more than anyone has or ever will love us [singletons].” Maddox refers to the “I heart-heart my twin” T-shirts that depict two side-by-side hearts and that some pairs of twins wore at Twinsburg 2005 as a kind of “quiet ecstasy of platonic love” implying a kind of self-love that would promote cloning. Maddox’s equation of twinship—with fears of cloning—demonizes, oppresses, and marginalizes them. His over-the-top text, published in the popular science magazine Discover, no less, demonstrates the extent to which outsiders may see Twins Days twins’ sense of communion with each other as disintegrating or undermining boundaries between self and other. Twins, thus, undermine Western notions of relationality and an individualism that should maintain a “mystery of mutual distance between individuals” (Ehrenreich 2007, 12).

Maddox, although overwhelmed and spooked by the mass performance of identicalness, appears to have made no effort to talk to twins. Kristi, however, who began referring to the Twins Days Festival as “clone days,” repeatedly told us that what kept her grounded was the fact that Dorothy and I (who did not dress alike) were obviously “two separate individuals, two different people, two real people.” Although this chapter starts with an example of us performing our identicality, Dorothy and I initially shared Kristi’s shock at such calculated and flagrant exhibitions of likeness and what we saw as a denial of individuality. We should have known better, of course, as any twin or anyone who knows twins well understands that twins are individuals. At twins festivals, twins are doing the part of their self-work that addresses their similarities and mutuality. Yet, for us the visual and visceral impact of so many people, particularly adults our own age, looking alike and dressing alike was deeply disconcerting. As we talked to twins, however, we began to see beyond the stereotype and came to better understand the difference between public, festival performance and reality.

Festivals are fun and freaky. They entertain and excite the imagination. The outsiders’ perspectives, however, are not all negative. Singleton observers can and do positively identify with the mutuality and connectedness they observe between and among the twin pairs. Kristi reports that on the plane ride back home to South Dakota, she had never felt so alone in all her life. In his feature article on the Twinsburg festival, a British journalist writes, “I hadn’t bargained for the emotional consequences of socializing with hordes of twins. After two days I began to feel profoundly lonely, as if I were lacking another half who walked, talked and wrote features exactly like me” (Barrell 2003, 5). In this positive view of twinship, twins are viewed as uniquely close and are envied for having a best friend (Stewart 2003). Twins are assumed to have an ideal companion who understands them (Wright 1997). Kristi told us that after Twins Days she was haunted by wishes that she too had a twin; having a singleton sister was just not enough. Twins often hear others wish that they too were a twin. Twinship clearly has a positive side that celebrates a mutuality, a friendliness, and a sense of “we-ness” that singletons recognize as absent in their own lives. Obviously, the twin persona, although deviant, has negative and positive aspects. Twins, as we see in chapter 6, often refer to “having a friend for life” or “always having someone there for you.” Twins and twinship reflect multiple realities and selfways. Twins talk reflects these multiple realities and ambivalences, but first I need to comment on how twins themselves blur or bridge insider and outsider roles at Twins Days by becoming their own audience.

At all festivals and public events there are performers and audiences, but their roles are often blurred. At festivals the individual feels he is an indissoluble part of the collectivity, or the crowd—a member of the people’s mass body. In this scenario the individual body ceases to a certain extent to be itself, and at the same time people become aware of their sensual, material, bodily unity and community (Bakhtin [1965] cited in Morris 1995, 226). This is also true of twins festivals. One particular example is what I call a “twin agglomeration.” Twin agglomerations are spontaneous happenings that occur repeatedly throughout the festivals. During the festival, twins and the media are constantly taking pictures. For example, at the Twinsburg opening night picnic, there were twin sisters who wore identical, colorful West African tie-died dresses and elaborate cloth headdresses. As they agreeably posed for photographs, the twins photographing them would then join them as others took their picture. What was originally one set of twins in a photo became a line of twins standing shoulder to shoulder until the crowd got so large that no more twins fit into the picture. This happens repeatedly as festival twins switch from audience to performer with enthusiastic fluidity. Twins thus perform their identicality for the lens of other twins as well as for outside observers in which the press figures prominently. Although fun for twins, agglomerations are frustrating for professional photographers, as revealed to me by a photographer who was shooting pictures for an article in a popular science magazine. His attempts to capture one pair of twins were constantly thwarted by the continued entry of other sets of twins into his shot.

Attending a festival can be too much for some twins who try it once and never again. Yet for twins who are hooked, a large part of the pleasure comes from saving and planning for the Twins Days weekend. Our talking partners told us that when they return home, they no longer make any effort to dress alike (except for Julie and Jenny) and would feel uncomfortable doing so. It is also interesting that despite considerable effort invested in looking alike for two days, every set of twins we talked with remarked that they felt that most other sets of identical twins at the conference looked more alike than they did.

Insider View of Outsider View: What We Think You Think

Being among other sets of twins en masse ironically heightens twins’ senses of not only being twins but also of being anomalies. Our conversations with Twins Days twins reveal that they have much to say about the outsiders’ views of them as twins. Dorothy and I, before Twins Days, had never used or even heard of the term “singleton.” We certainly had a sense of being special because we were twins. We were lifelong actors of the twin game, but we had never developed a sense of “us” as twins versus a “them” of the single born. At Twinsburg, we found ourselves buying into and frequently referring to this new boundary of identity. Like other festival twins, we began to position ourselves as distinct from the singleton other. By performing twinship, Twins Days twins report that one of the attractions of participating in festivals is the sense of resisting or inverting the singleton norm. Twins festivals are a counterhegemonic act of resistance to outside moldings of one’s personality (cf. Lindholm 2001, 218) or the very nature of being. Festivals are occasions where, for a few days, a new space is created (Lindholm 2001, 219) in which twins as “us” become the norm and singletons become “them,” or the other. At festivals from a twin’s perspective, the singleton becomes an exotic other and twins the norm.

As the archetype of “twins as freaks” takes over, twins become normalized in the process. When performing as twins, insiders feel less freakish while at the same time actually confirming their freakishness to the singleton outsider. By reversing the rules, the “freaks” take over and the “mighty” are found wanting. By literally parading around, twins challenge what is seen as the natural order and everyday constructions of being. Many of our talking partners would remark on how good it felt to be surrounded by twins, to be in an environment where twins were the norm rather than the exception. For once they felt free from the question “What is it like to be a twin?” They repeatedly told us that it was liberating to talk to Dorothy and me as researchers who were also twins.

Twins Days has a way of creating militant twins. Tim and Tom had been in the festival parade before coming to us for an interview. When we asked them at the end of our interview if they wanted to add anything, Tom presented the following commentary:

Tom: Maybe one question [to pursue] is on the way society looks at us. Like when we were walking in the parade this morning and it was, “Oh, the twins are walking down the thing [street].” And I explain to somebody during the parade that the twin parade is like a regular parade. You have clowns and you have elephants. And I said, “We’re the elephants.” And then I told Tim, “There’s someone with a shovel in the back.” We’re the normal ones, OK? . . . When people ask you, “How do you feel about being a twin? Do you feel like you are special or do you feel like you are a mistake?” We’re what? One percent of the population? We’re born that way so we’re not a mistake. But when people ask me what does it feel like to be a twin, I answer, “What does it feel like not to be a twin?” I don’t know what it feels like to be a twin, I am a twin. I tell them, “I’m normal; you’re the freak.”

Dona: You’re [singleton] the one with the imaginary friend; mine was real.

My rejoinder to Tom may be an example of “leading the witness,” but it also brings out another important theme about the twin self.

Performing twinship is not just about seeing double or being identical. Twins come to Twinsburg (and the ITAs) to celebrate a sense of connectedness and mutuality that lies deep below the mere surface of their bodies. Karan’s observation below has an edge to it that was common in our interviews.

Karan: I keep saying this . . . it’s just on the surface but everyone keeps asking, “What is it like to be a twin?” I’m like, I have no idea what it’s not like to be a twin. So I have no idea what it’s like not to have somebody at my side all the time. . . . really I could care less about what it means not to be a twin.

Side-by-side festival twins perform what they see as a special sense of mutuality or a special kind or condition of self. Elizabeth Stewart (2003) calls this the “we-self.” It is a mutuality twins know firsthand and so they come together for a pan-twin celebration of this shared sense of connection. They refer to this as the twin bond; it is a special bond that twins feel yet singletons fail to appreciate or experience. Although this theme is developed in chapter 5, suffice it to say here that at festivals, twins celebrate the we-ness of their twinship. In doing so, they provide a counterpoint to what Wright (1997, 55) rather benignly characterizes as their “uncanny relationship” and what Maddox (2006, 66) refers to as a “quiet ecstasy of platonic love” among “every double one of them.” What twins feel the outsider does not understand is that their celebrated sense of connection is rooted not only in the similar faces and bodies but also in the sense of connectedness that comes from shared lives. Twins report a special sense of connectedness, or relatedness, that is unlike the other forms of relatedness they experience in their lives. What it means to be bonded as twins, they say, is something only a twin can know. Twins feel that within the twin dyad, needs for affiliation and autonomy work themselves out differently than for singletons. If culture exists in performance (Hastrup 1995a), then at the Twinsburg festival, identical twins may be seen as negotiating their duality and unity in what McCollum (2002) characterizes as a culture that views autonomy and relationality as opposites and privileges the former. For the adult talking partners, attending Twins Days results in a kind of renewal, or revitalization, of their twin identities and relationship. For two or three days of heightened experience, they relive, rehone and refashion, and share (with other twins) the practical experiences of twinship. Getting in the spirit at Twins Days, certainly among participant twins, fosters a sense of rebellion, of being apart from a singleton-dominated world, and in the case of our talking partners (and ourselves), an emergent identity of being a militant twin.

The ITA: Touring Twins

Being relegated to the Research Pavilion at Twinsburg had isolated us from the daytime festival activities such as the parades, group photos, look-alike contests, and talent shows. After Twins Days, Dorothy and I wanted to have the full experience as participants at a twins festival. We also wanted to see if the twins talk we shared in the more formalized settings of Twinsburg also carried over to less formal settings. After Twins Days we decided to attend the International Twins Association meetings held at the end of summer 2003 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Although organized around similar activities the much smaller ITAs have a far different ambiance from Twins Days. The ITAs lack the funds and media savvy of the numerous Twins Days committees. Attendees at the ITAs know each other and renew their acquaintances every year, while Twins Days twins largely are and will remain strangers to each other. Twinsburg, with its thousands of attendees, is a kind of common interest activity. The ITAs, attended mainly by adult twins, is a common interest group. There are hardly any parents of young twins in attendance, and the media is neither a notable nor active presence. Twins Days, in contrast, treats twins more as a category of paired persons. Twins Days twins mill around a common ground while deciding as a twin pair which activities they will participate in or merely pass by. While evening parties and activities reveal that there are cliques composed of twins who have known each other over the years, the overwhelming majority of Twins Days twins will remain anonymous to each other. The ITAs are organized around formally scheduled activities in which all attendees are expected to participate. Unlike Twins Days, it is impossible to participate without registering. Wearing name tags, all attendees get to know each other. ITA attendees make an effort to introduce themselves to all the participants. While both festivals have an ecumenical Sunday church service, the more intimate and elderly oriented ITAs express a concern with the spirituality and well-being of the members. Unlike Twins Days with its permanent professional or semiprofessional organizers, each ITA meeting is organized by local sets of twins (or triplets) who live near the meeting site and put a great deal of time and effort into ensuring a successful festival. ITA leadership rotates among members, and each year’s conference organizers take on visible roles as hosts for all the weekend activities. Unlike the more cosmopolitan Twins Days and its attendant outsiders, there is no sense of “us” against “them.” At the Atlanta ITA, Dorothy and I discovered how pleasant it was to make friends with and hang out with other sets of twins. Over the three days we came to feel a mutual sense of affinity with the ITA twins that was strong enough to bring us back to another meeting.

The ITAs lack the wild party atmosphere of offsite events at the hotels in Twinsburg. Although welcoming and extremely sociable, the ITAs are not as much freaky or wild as they are wholesome fun. Even if the overall ambience of the ITAs is a bit different from that of Twins Days, which can be characterized as having an expressive disposition toward rebellion and revelry, the ITAs embody what Barbara Ehrenreich (2007), bemoaning the loss of ecstatic rituals, carnivals, and celebrations in Western tradition, describes in the title of her book as “collective joy.” Ehrenreich (2007, 11) is mainly concerned with public events, which she terms “ecstatic rituals,” as forms of collective excitement and festivity that place participants as liminal or marginal to the social order and result in a spontaneous sense of communion with one another. Ehrenreich also notes, however, that mind-altering states also may be more secularly understood as collective joy or having fun. While I would not describe ITA events as generating mind-altering experiences, spontaneous moments of joy, happiness, elation, excitement, and exhilaration—in the form of shared and sustained giggling—are certainly part of the communal ITA twin experience.

Maybe it is because I am an academic and we all take ourselves too seriously, but what has been largely absent from my adult life are moments of extreme silliness. I remember them well from adolescence, when Dorothy and I, in the company of friends, would get silly and laugh until we lost our breath, shed tears, or worse. I treasure those few and far between incidents that encourage super silliness. In my fieldwork in remote fishing communities in Newfoundland and northern Norway, I found those moments to occur among groups of adult women with far more frequency than was the case in my own adult life. At the ITA events, unacquainted twins do not remain strangers for long; the personal identities of all participants become eroded by the nightly hilarious, but humiliating and undignified, activities in which they participate. It is these activities, and the conviviality that emerges from them, that I situate my analysis of the ITAs as public events.

ITA organizers and participants take having fun to the point of absurdity, in a way that both is extremely entertaining and creates a sense of collective intimacy among participating twins, who suspend their own sense of dignified individuality or sense of self to join in a playful collective celebration of twinness. The ITA revels in (nonalcoholic) silliness as a kind of high hilarity. At the ITAs already liminal selves—twins—commune and make merry. Every night is dress-up night. Twins dress according to themes chosen by each venue. At Asheville’s Hollywood night, triplet Bill Clinton doppelgangers elicited hysterical laughter as they worked the crowd, flirting with all the women. Skits and talent contests performed by acquaintances, who may or may not be all that talented, elicit shared audience laughter, as do more professional shows where a hypnotist amuses the audience with the antics of hypnotized twins. But it is the silly games that lead most participants to hysterically shared laughter. Participants at the ITAs are a rather conservative and sedate group. (For example, no one in our age group dressed as hippies for High School Night.) In addition, religious ceremonies and a nonecstatic spiritual element of camaraderie prevail at the ITAs. Nonetheless, the satirical and sexually suggestive behavior that does exist is more potent precisely because it is perceived as naughty. For example, one game in Atlanta involved two teams. One team consisted of participants holding rolls of toilet paper between their legs; the other team held toilet plungers between their legs. The aim was to put the plunger into the tissue roll hole. Nobody was very good at this and it became most amusing. Not all games are sexual parodies. Trivia games exaggerated personalities as they pitted teams of twins against each other. Although such high jinks and high times may not be the kinds of ecstatic experience that Ehrenreich (2007) attributes to festivals in the Middle Ages, they are certainly shared, high-spirited good times. As such, it is not so much twins at play with twinship (as at Twins Days), as twins at play.

The Public Faces of Twinship

The idea of twinscapes becomes quite literal at festivals where hundreds or even thousands of twins of all ages gather to celebrate their twinship by performing society’s stereotype of them. Even very different-looking DZ twins dress alike. As the Twins Days website advises and as Steph and Jenna learned, getting into the festival spirit means dressing alike and looking alike as much as possible. Yet twins, as we have seen, are envisioned differently by the different types of festival participants. These include twins, researchers, festival organizers, the general public, and the media. In this chapter I have described different perspectives on twins festivals that reflect a variety of combinations and permutations of insider (twins) and outsider (singleton) perspectives. Festivals also exhibit a number of discordant attributes that the wider society accords twins. Festival twins as a kind of deviant persona are positively viewed for their companionate, shared identities as well as for their mutual understanding and interpersonal closeness. Yet it is also these same features that characterize twins as a deviant persona in a negative way. While the insider twin’s view celebrates the positive, the media tends to express the negative. An extreme example of the negative perspective is illustrated by Maddox’s (2006, 66) popular science depiction of Twinsburg as a freak show. He writes, “You can’t be an individual and like being twins; you can’t be twins and, you know, want to be like the rest of us: all alone and unique and, you know, individual.” At Twinsburg and the ITAs, however, for two days twins embrace and celebrate the positive dimensions of their cultural persona as they act out or perform society’s stereotypes of identical and paired best friends for life. Certainly festival twins buy into society’s stereotypes by going over the top or exaggerating their twinship. But, perhaps more importantly, they also celebrate what Maddox would see as a counternorm: they are not alone, they are not unique, and they are not always individuals. Twins festivals as public events can, thus, be viewed as social heresy. They invert the prevailing Western and singleton view of a distinct, bounded, and separate self, as opposed to a distinct, bounded, and separate other.

I started this chapter with an example of Dorothy and me playfully performing the twin game for Dorothy’s yoga instructor. In many ways festivals, as we have seen, are the twin game writ large. They are about sharing a good time. As individuals and as a pair, they tease and challenge the observer to play their same and different identity games. Festivals fit well with the anthropological literature on festivals as rites of reversal or rebellion. Handelman (1990) speaks somewhat metaphorically of festivals as public events amounting to stories people tell themselves about themselves. I take a more literal approach. What twins actually have to say about their festival experiences evolves as a kind of positioned countervoice that challenges, critiques, or satirizes the twin persona in its positive and negative aspects. The Twinsburg talking partners had a great deal to say about their festival experience and, in so doing, reengage issues of biological identity. By embodying and performing “same,” Dorothy and I invite observers to discover “different” or to bridge their own dualistic attitudes. A pair of middle-aged festival twins dressed like Dolly Parton are a single Dolly and not a single Dolly. They know it and so do we. In today’s Western culture there is both unity in diversity and diversity in unity (Goode 2001). Festival twins revel in playing these notions against each other. Twins at festivals do not negate individuality. When the proud and tired parents of twins return home, they worry about how to develop and nurture their children’s twinship and their independence and individuality. When festivals are over, each twin goes back to his or her own life and looks forward to spending more time with her or his twin in the future.

Referring to intergenerational clones rather than identical twins, Deborah Battaglia (1995a) raises two important questions that continue to be central themes in chapters 4 and 5. First, she asks why looking at a copy of oneself should violate some profound sense of individuality. Second, taking the perspective that cloning extends possibilities for connecting to others, she posits that rather than ask “What constrains autonomy?” we should ask “What constrains connectivity?” The answer to these questions moves from a focus on twinship as public performance or twins en masse to a closer look at twins and twinship as acting the parts within the twin dyad.

4: Body

Isn’t it rich? Aren’t we a pair? Where are the clones? Send in the clones. There ought to be clones. Well, maybe we’re here.

—Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” revised lyrics by dinner tablemates at an ITA event

Genes have lost their privileged and prominent status particularly as the distinction between nature and nurture disappears.

—Spector 2012

If two people do the same thing, then it is not the same thing.

—Devereux 1978

At the 2007 International Congress of Twin Studies in Ghent, Belgium, I was frequently corrected by a prominent, singleton twins researcher for using the term “identical twins” and for referring to myself as “an identical twin.” In casual conversation, the researcher repeatedly told me to use the term monozygotic, or MZ, instead of identical. I found her constant corrections to be quite irritating. This was her idea of political correctness because, of course, no two individuals are completely identical.10My pique lay in the fact that an “outbred individual” (Charlemaine 2002, 18), who made her living studying twins, had taken on the role of defining the parameters of my identity for me. She was appropriating my own “Who am I?” questions and turning them into her own “Who or what are you?” questions. On the one hand, by the researcher’s repeated use of the term monozygotic, I felt that my identity as an identical twin was being reduced to our “one-egg status” (cf. Casselman 2008) or (in terms of DNA twin type testing) the identical genes I “share” with my twin sister. These sensitivities were certainly heightened by my immersion in a setting where “bio power” ruled (cf. Nichter 2013, 647), where biology and genetics dominated this twin research conference, and where studies that did not have laboratory data confirming genetic twin types were relegated to a second-tier status.11On the other hand, the researcher was suggesting that my resemblance to my sister was (to paraphrase Zazzo, cited in Farmer [1996, 93]) “only a superficial” likeness. To me, monozygotic not only is a mouthful in the saying but hardly defines my sense of self as a twin, since it roots my “true” identity in an invisible, subcellular level that can be truly assessed only in the laboratory. Moreover, whether superficial is used in the sense of surface or shallow, the phrase only superficial denies the realities of the daily lived, practical experiences related to the surface of twins’ bodies and consequently the embodiment and management of identity among twins who look alike.

If Dorothy had attended this conference and had been sitting beside me, would this researcher, who was so willing to call the tune, have played the twin game? Would she surreptitiously gaze at our conference badges in order to get our identities right? Or would she just avoid using our names, perhaps collapsing our identities because she could not tell us apart? Dorothy and I have always thought of ourselves collectively as identical twins and individually as an identical twin. Although it plays with and against type, identical was also the popular or lay term of self-reference used by the Twins Days and ICTS twins. A defining feature of self among our talking partners in Twinsburg was one’s existence as and with a twin brother or sister whose body looks very much like one’s own.

My pique at the ICTS researcher for co-opting my twin identity is hardly idiosyncratic, as an interesting incidence from Twinsburg illustrates. At Twinsburg, as Dorothy and I were waiting for twins to arrive on the festival grounds, we asked a fellow researcher how his team handled ethical issues when it came to twins supplying body products for his research. The researcher, stating that there were standard procedures for following ethical practices in medical research, was nonplussed by this issue but did mention the ethical uproar over a past project that offered to inform twins of their chromosomal status as MZ or DZ twins. Blinded by their own gene-centrism, the researchers had failed to anticipate that telling a set of twins that they were not identical could be very traumatic to some twins, who, having a lifelong identity of being identical twins, contested or refused to believe the chromosomal assessments.

The Pragmatics of Embodied Identities

As Stewart (2003) states, twins are a biological and a social fact. Yet biological and social tend to exist as two separate fields of inquiry. My goal in this chapter is to develop and present a more interactional biosocial perspective, in terms of both theory and data. In this chapter I focus on identity issues raised by twins’ bodies as biological and sociocultural phenomena. I compare and contrast the perspectives of those who research twins’ bodies with the embodied perspectives of twins themselves. The former draws in large part on the two ICTS conferences I attended, particularly research sessions that privileged the twin research method and genetics. These sessions held center stage throughout both the conferences I attended. The latter draws from twins talk, as voiced by the Twinsburg twins. It privileges the notion of the biosocial as embodied through human activities (Pálsson 2013, 24). Posed side by side, the talking partners reflect on, perform, and embrace the body pragmatics of being same and different. I eschew research paradigms that oppose biology to culture or nature to nurture. Whether phrased as an old-school genetic determinism that emphasizes same or a new-school genetic flexibility that emphasizes difference (Charney 2012; Spector 2013), both schools focus on heritability and reduce real people to subcellular processes identified through the sophisticated, technologically complex practices of molecular biology. Instead, my focus is on how culture shapes and gives meaning, not only to the physical surfaces and relational bodies of twins but also to the methods, agendas, and assumptions of those who research them.

When twins use the term identical, it becomes a far more adaptable, flexible, and polytypic term for selving than is the case for the far more rigid or fixed terms like MZ. Genes are hardly the essence of being for twins. Twins’ narratives show that subcellular referents or essentializing terms, like monozygotic, contemporary clones, or histone acetylation, do not allow much leeway for self-determination and identity management. The practical experience of twinship entails the negotiation and practice of multiple, complex, and sometimes contradictory selfways within a particular sociocultural milieu. As we have seen, at the same time that society expects twins to be identical, it also locates twins on the fault lines of identity. Western society carries a lot of moral baggage when it comes to twins—as two people who look “too much” alike. As self work, volunteering for buccal smears (saliva samples) pales in terms of the self working that twins must do, and are skilled at doing, because it is a reality of their lived experience that the surfaces of their bodies are viewed as so identical that others confuse, conflate, deny, or overlook their individual identities.

In this chapter twins talk shows how biology counts but not in ways expected by more biologically oriented twins researchers. As the focus shifts from the scientific perspectives of twins researchers to the subjective experiences of twins themselves, explanatory frameworks that feature the laboratory-based discoveries of hidden codes or acquired heritable characteristics (Charney 2012) give way to more experientially based expressions of talk and action that flesh out the surfaces of twins’ bodies. To fill the gaps between professional and lay understandings of twins, new lines of inquiry are proposed that feature and develop notions of body pragmatics and intercorporeality as they shape the practice or practical experiences of twinship. These reflect twins’ own takes on being, conterminously, both same and different and on being both separate and together.

Genetics: Duplicates and Chemistries of Self