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 level that can be truly assessed only in the laboratory. Moreover, whether superficial is used in the sense of surface or shallow, the phrase only superficial denies the realities of the daily lived, practical experiences related to the surface of twins’ bodies and consequently the embodiment and management 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
