Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
activities, and the conviviality that emerges from them, that I situate my analysis of the ITAs as public events.
ITA organizers and participants take having fun to the point of absurdity, in a way that both is extremely entertaining and creates a sense of collective intimacy among participating twins, who suspend their own sense of dignified individuality or sense of self to join in a playful collective celebration of twinness. The ITA revels in (nonalcoholic) silliness as a kind of high hilarity. At the ITAs already liminal selves—twins—commune and make merry. Every night is dress-up night. Twins dress according to themes chosen by each venue. At Asheville’s Hollywood night, triplet Bill Clinton doppelgangers elicited hysterical laughter as they worked the crowd, flirting with all the women. Skits and talent contests performed by acquaintances, who may or may not be all that talented, elicit shared audience laughter, as do more professional shows where a hypnotist amuses the audience with the antics of hypnotized twins. But it is the silly games that lead most participants to hysterically shared laughter. Participants at the ITAs are a rather conservative and sedate group. (For example, no one in our age group dressed as hippies for High School Night.) In addition, religious ceremonies and a nonecstatic spiritual element of camaraderie prevail at the ITAs. Nonetheless, the satirical and sexually suggestive behavior that does exist is more potent precisely because it is perceived as naughty. For example, one game in Atlanta involved two teams. One team consisted of participants holding rolls of toilet paper between their legs; the other team held toilet plungers between their legs. The aim was to put the plunger into the tissue roll hole. Nobody was very good at this and it became most amusing. Not all games are sexual parodies. Trivia games exaggerated personalities as they pitted teams of twins against each other. Although such high jinks and high times may not be the kinds of ecstatic experience that Ehrenreich (2007) attributes to festivals in the Middle Ages, they are certainly shared, high-spirited good times. As such, it is not so much twins at play with twinship (as at Twins Days), as twins at play.
The Public Faces of Twinship
The idea of twinscapes becomes quite literal at festivals where hundreds or even thousands of twins of all ages gather to celebrate their twinship by performing society’s stereotype of them. Even very different-looking DZ twins dress alike. As the Twins Days website advises and as Steph and Jenna learned, getting into the festival spirit means dressing alike and looking alike as much as possible. Yet twins, as we have seen, are envisioned differently by the different types of festival participants. These include twins, researchers, festival organizers, the general public, and the media. In this chapter I have described different perspectives on twins festivals that reflect a variety of combinations and permutations of insider (twins) and outsider (singleton) perspectives. Festivals also exhibit a number of discordant attributes that the wider society accords twins. Festival twins as a kind of deviant persona are positively viewed for their companionate, shared identities as well as for their mutual understanding and interpersonal closeness. Yet it is also these same features that characterize twins as a deviant persona in a negative way. While the insider twin’s view celebrates the positive, the media tends to express the negative. An extreme example of the negative perspective is illustrated by Maddox’s (2006, 66) popular science depiction of Twinsburg as a freak show. He writes, “You can’t be an individual and like being twins; you can’t be twins and, you know, want to be like the rest of us: all alone and unique and, you know, individual.” At Twinsburg and the ITAs, however, for two days twins embrace and celebrate the positive dimensions of their cultural persona as they act out or perform society’s stereotypes of identical and paired best friends for life. Certainly festival twins buy into society’s stereotypes by going over the top or exaggerating their twinship. But, perhaps more importantly, they also celebrate what Maddox would see as a counternorm: they are not alone, they are not unique, and they are not always individuals. Twins festivals as public events can, thus, be viewed as social heresy. They invert the prevailing Western and singleton view of a distinct, bounded, and separate self, as opposed to a distinct, bounded, and separate other.
I started this chapter with an example of Dorothy and me playfully performing the twin game for Dorothy’s yoga instructor. In many ways festivals, as we have seen, are the twin game writ large. They are about sharing a good time. As individuals and as a pair, they tease and challenge the observer to play their same and different identity games. Festivals fit well with the anthropological literature on festivals as rites of reversal or rebellion. Handelman (1990) speaks somewhat metaphorically of festivals as public events amounting to stories people tell themselves about themselves. I take a more literal approach. What twins actually have to say about their festival experiences evolves as a kind of positioned countervoice that challenges, critiques, or satirizes the twin persona in its positive and negative aspects. The Twinsburg talking partners had a great deal to say about their festival experience and, in so doing, reengage issues of biological identity. By embodying and performing “same,” Dorothy and I invite observers to discover “different” or to bridge their own dualistic attitudes. A pair of middle-aged festival twins dressed like Dolly Parton are a single Dolly and not a single Dolly. They know it and so do we. In today’s Western culture there is both unity in diversity and diversity in unity (Goode 2001). Festival twins revel in playing these notions against each other. Twins at festivals do not negate individuality. When the proud and tired parents of twins return home, they worry about how to develop and nurture their children’s twinship and their independence and individuality. When festivals are over, each twin goes back to his or her own life and looks forward to spending more time with her or his twin in the future.
Referring to intergenerational clones rather than identical twins, Deborah Battaglia (1995a) raises two important questions that continue to be central themes in chapters 4 and 5. First, she asks why looking at a copy of oneself should violate some profound sense of individuality. Second, taking the perspective that cloning extends possibilities for connecting to others, she posits that rather than ask “What constrains autonomy?” we should ask “What constrains connectivity?” The answer to these questions moves from a focus on twinship as public performance or twins en masse to a closer look at twins and twinship as acting the parts within the twin dyad.
4: Body
Isn’t it rich? Aren’t we a pair? Where are the clones? Send in the clones. There ought to be clones. Well, maybe we’re here.
—Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” revised lyrics by dinner tablemates at an ITA event
Genes have lost their privileged and prominent status particularly as the distinction between nature and nurture disappears.
—Spector 2012
If two people do the same thing, then it is not the same thing.
—Devereux 1978
At the 2007 International Congress of Twin Studies in Ghent, Belgium, I was frequently corrected by a prominent, singleton twins researcher for using the term “identical twins” and for referring to myself as “an identical twin.” In casual conversation, the researcher repeatedly told me to use the term monozygotic, or MZ, instead of identical. I found her constant corrections to be quite irritating. This was her idea of political correctness because, of course, no two individuals are completely identical.10My pique lay in the fact that an “outbred individual” (Charlemaine 2002, 18), who made her living studying twins, had taken on the role of defining the parameters of my identity for me. She was appropriating my own “Who am I?” questions and turning them into her own “Who or what are you?” questions. On the one hand, by the researcher’s repeated use of the term monozygotic, I felt that my identity as an identical twin was being reduced to our “one-egg status” (cf. Casselman 2008) or (in terms of DNA twin type testing) the identical genes I “share” with my twin sister. These sensitivities were certainly heightened by my immersion in a setting where “bio power” ruled (cf. Nichter 2013, 647), where biology and genetics dominated this twin research conference, and where studies that did not have laboratory data confirming genetic twin types were relegated to a second-tier status.11On the other hand, the researcher was suggesting that my resemblance to my sister was (to paraphrase Zazzo, cited in Farmer [1996, 93]) “only a superficial” likeness. To me, monozygotic not only is a mouthful in the saying but hardly defines my sense of self as a twin, since it roots my “true” identity in an invisible, subcellular