Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
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