Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
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