Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
of identity among twins who look alike.
If Dorothy had attended this conference and had been sitting beside me, would this researcher, who was so willing to call the tune, have played the twin game? Would she surreptitiously gaze at our conference badges in order to get our identities right? Or would she just avoid using our names, perhaps collapsing our identities because she could not tell us apart? Dorothy and I have always thought of ourselves collectively as identical twins and individually as an identical twin. Although it plays with and against type, identical was also the popular or lay term of self-reference used by the Twins Days and ICTS twins. A defining feature of self among our talking partners in Twinsburg was one’s existence as and with a twin brother or sister whose body looks very much like one’s own.
My pique at the ICTS researcher for co-opting my twin identity is hardly idiosyncratic, as an interesting incidence from Twinsburg illustrates. At Twinsburg, as Dorothy and I were waiting for twins to arrive on the festival grounds, we asked a fellow researcher how his team handled ethical issues when it came to twins supplying body products for his research. The researcher, stating that there were standard procedures for following ethical practices in medical research, was nonplussed by this issue but did mention the ethical uproar over a past project that offered to inform twins of their chromosomal status as MZ or DZ twins. Blinded by their own gene-centrism, the researchers had failed to anticipate that telling a set of twins that they were not identical could be very traumatic to some twins, who, having a lifelong identity of being identical twins, contested or refused to believe the chromosomal assessments.
The Pragmatics of Embodied Identities
As Stewart (2003) states, twins are a biological and a social fact. Yet biological and social tend to exist as two separate fields of inquiry. My goal in this chapter is to develop and present a more interactional biosocial perspective, in terms of both theory and data. In this chapter I focus on identity issues raised by twins’ bodies as biological and sociocultural phenomena. I compare and contrast the perspectives of those who research twins’ bodies with the embodied perspectives of twins themselves. The former draws in large part on the two ICTS conferences I attended, particularly research sessions that privileged the twin research method and genetics. These sessions held center stage throughout both the conferences I attended. The latter draws from twins talk, as voiced by the Twinsburg twins. It privileges the notion of the biosocial as embodied through human activities (Pálsson 2013, 24). Posed side by side, the talking partners reflect on, perform, and embrace the body pragmatics of being same and different. I eschew research paradigms that oppose biology to culture or nature to nurture. Whether phrased as an old-school genetic determinism that emphasizes same or a new-school genetic flexibility that emphasizes difference (Charney 2012; Spector 2013), both schools focus on heritability and reduce real people to subcellular processes identified through the sophisticated, technologically complex practices of molecular biology. Instead, my focus is on how culture shapes and gives meaning, not only to the physical surfaces and relational bodies of twins but also to the methods, agendas, and assumptions of those who research them.
When twins use the term identical, it becomes a far more adaptable, flexible, and polytypic term for selving than is the case for the far more rigid or fixed terms like MZ. Genes are hardly the essence of being for twins. Twins’ narratives show that subcellular referents or essentializing terms, like monozygotic, contemporary clones, or histone acetylation, do not allow much leeway for self-determination and identity management. The practical experience of twinship entails the negotiation and practice of multiple, complex, and sometimes contradictory selfways within a particular sociocultural milieu. As we have seen, at the same time that society expects twins to be identical, it also locates twins on the fault lines of identity. Western society carries a lot of moral baggage when it comes to twins—as two people who look “too much” alike. As self work, volunteering for buccal smears (saliva samples) pales in terms of the self working that twins must do, and are skilled at doing, because it is a reality of their lived experience that the surfaces of their bodies are viewed as so identical that others confuse, conflate, deny, or overlook their individual identities.
In this chapter twins talk shows how biology counts but not in ways expected by more biologically oriented twins researchers. As the focus shifts from the scientific perspectives of twins researchers to the subjective experiences of twins themselves, explanatory frameworks that feature the laboratory-based discoveries of hidden codes or acquired heritable characteristics (Charney 2012) give way to more experientially based expressions of talk and action that flesh out the surfaces of twins’ bodies. To fill the gaps between professional and lay understandings of twins, new lines of inquiry are proposed that feature and develop notions of body pragmatics and intercorporeality as they shape the practice or practical experiences of twinship. These reflect twins’ own takes on being, conterminously, both same and different and on being both separate and together.
Genetics: Duplicates and Chemistries of Self
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