Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
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,