for eight consecutive years. When they competed in their first festival look-alike contest, Arnette was over sixty pounds heavier than Annette. After the first festival, Arnette was inspired to lose the extra weight so they would look more alike for future contests. Twins who attend twins festivals are enthusiastic performers of an envisioned twin persona. At festivals, twins become the norm as look-alike twins of all ages dominate the peoplescape. By performing identical or sameness, twins place themselves at odds with Western society’s notions of independence, autonomy, and individuality. This becomes clear when we take into account the views of the media and singletons.
Outsider’s View: An Audience of Singletons
Because twins dominate the peoplescape in Twinsburg, they provide a dramatic twinscape for outsiders who attend the festival. Outsiders are singletons who include researchers, reporters, spouses, siblings, parents, children, friends of twins, service or sales personnel, and the general public who watch the parades and contests. Reporters, feature writers, filmmakers, and photographers from all over the world descend on the Twins Days Festival. Outsiders’ views of festival twins can be ambivalent. Festivals are designed to shock and unsettle and, as public events (Handelman 1990), twins festivals give primacy to sensory visual codes. If a pair of twins can be described as “dramatically visible” and a “fascinating condition of humanity” (Wright 1997, 110), then what effect does the sight of thousands of pairs of twins have? Wright’s (1997) depiction of identical twins as an unsettling presence in the world well captures the singleton, outsider’s experience of twins festivals. Our research assistant, Kristi Cody (2004, 14), felt visually assaulted by the sight of so many twins. Kristi reports that she was “totally freaked” by Twins Days and claims, “It was like entering an episode of the X Files.” Journalist Tony Barrell (2003, 22) writes of Twins Days that the casual observer “is at risk of flipping out when they see all these human carbon copies.” Like Barrell, reporters have a field day with word play as they describe the impacts of seeing so many twins together. Their prose is peppered by references to “seeing double,” “double vision,” “double trouble,” “double the interest,” “two heads are better than one,” “freaks with four legs,” “queues of twos,” “doppelgangers,” “seeing double without the penalty of a hangover,” and so forth.
Seeing thousands of twins is a kind of assault on the senses and conflicts with the idea that one’s face should reflect one’s distinctiveness, or personal identity. Twins in this sense are weird and scary to the outsider, if not threatening or even dangerous. But the unsettling effect grows with the age of the twins. The anthropological literature on twins indicates that identical twins lose any of their culturally elaborated distinctiveness after childhood (Dorothy Davis 1971; Stewart 2003). Yet at Twinsburg, over 30 percent of twins registered for the festival are over twenty-one years old (Miller 2003). As Kristi told us, “The little kids are really cute, but for adults it’s kind of sick. They [identical adults] need to get a life.” Likewise, Bacon (2005) notes that while identically dressed babies are seen as a delight, identically dressed adults are not. In our society identically dressed adults will be stigmatized. Piontelli (2008, 219) has this to say about adult female twins who continue to dress alike.
Although doppelganger behavior elicits the attention of passers-by, it makes adults appear freakish or pathetic, just like the fading stars in “Sunset Boulevard” who try uselessly to hang on to their withered glory.
For singletons it appears that the face is a sort of label for a distinctiveness that lies within. If identical twins complement their like faces with identical outfits, the singleton observer suspects that the self may somehow be divided, diluted, or duplicated. If personal identities can be conflated, the self, especially at adulthood, is therefore impaired.
At festivals, as twins revel in dressing alike and surrender themselves to the pair, there is certainly a sense of what Bakhtin refers to as the exaggerated or grotesque body (Morris 1994). Although Bakhtin was describing the clowns of early medieval festivals, his depiction of the grotesque body as not individualized, as open, as having a double aspect, and as a kind of co-being that implies self/other interaction, certainly describes the twinscapes at modern-day festivals. Because they subvert normative expectations of unique identity, because the low are exalted, and because the freaks become the norm, twins festivals can be viewed as rites of inversion.
This perspective of the grotesque body and co-being is well verbalized by Maddox (2006, 66), a popular science writer who wrote a negative commentary about the 2005 Twinsburg festival. Portraying the festival, with its “muted horrors of pan-Twinism,” as exemplifying the dark side or doomsday scenario of a future world populated by clones, Maddox (2006, 66) refers to the twin participants as “deeply creeping me out with their mutual bodies.” He depicts twins as clones “without souls,” “without their own identities,” who will “never know the quintessential joy of feeling different.” Maddox also extends his distaste of what he sees as the biological duplication of one’s self to the twin’s relationship or what he terms the twin “love factor.” Maddox describes the Twinsburg twins who perambulate the festival grounds dressed alike and arm in arm as “existential puzzles,” with one twin knowing exactly what the other is going through and with a twin loving the other twin “arguably more than anyone has or ever will love us [singletons].” Maddox refers to the “I heart-heart my twin” T-shirts that depict two side-by-side hearts and that some pairs of twins wore at Twinsburg 2005 as a kind of “quiet ecstasy of platonic love” implying a kind of self-love that would promote cloning. Maddox’s equation of twinship—with fears of cloning—demonizes, oppresses, and marginalizes them. His over-the-top text, published in the popular science magazine Discover, no less, demonstrates the extent to which outsiders may see Twins Days twins’ sense of communion with each other as disintegrating or undermining boundaries between self and other. Twins, thus, undermine Western notions of relationality and an individualism that should maintain a “mystery of mutual distance between individuals” (Ehrenreich 2007, 12).
Maddox, although overwhelmed and spooked by the mass performance of identicalness, appears to have made no effort to talk to twins. Kristi, however, who began referring to the Twins Days Festival as “clone days,” repeatedly told us that what kept her grounded was the fact that Dorothy and I (who did not dress alike) were obviously “two separate individuals, two different people, two real people.” Although this chapter starts with an example of us performing our identicality, Dorothy and I initially shared Kristi’s shock at such calculated and flagrant exhibitions of likeness and what we saw as a denial of individuality. We should have known better, of course, as any twin or anyone who knows twins well understands that twins are individuals. At twins festivals, twins are doing the part of their self-work that addresses their similarities and mutuality. Yet, for us the visual and visceral impact of so many people, particularly adults our own age, looking alike and dressing alike was deeply disconcerting. As we talked to twins, however, we began to see beyond the stereotype and came to better understand the difference between public, festival performance and reality.
Festivals are fun and freaky. They entertain and excite the imagination. The outsiders’ perspectives, however, are not all negative. Singleton observers can and do positively identify with the mutuality and connectedness they observe between and among the twin pairs. Kristi reports that on the plane ride back home to South Dakota, she had never felt so alone in all her life. In his feature article on the Twinsburg festival, a British journalist writes, “I hadn’t bargained for the emotional consequences of socializing with hordes of twins. After two days I began to feel profoundly lonely, as if I were lacking another half who walked, talked and wrote features exactly like me” (Barrell 2003, 5). In this positive view of twinship, twins are viewed as uniquely close and are envied for having a best friend (Stewart 2003). Twins are assumed to have an ideal companion who understands them (Wright 1997). Kristi told us that after Twins Days she was haunted by wishes that she too had a twin; having a singleton sister was just not enough. Twins often hear others wish that they too were a twin. Twinship clearly has a positive side that celebrates a mutuality, a friendliness, and a sense of “we-ness” that singletons recognize as absent in their own lives. Obviously, the twin
