Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
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)