Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
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