tale becomes real. There actually is someone else who is wearing the visual signs of your identity on their face and body. Twins’ physical similarities often result in others confusing, confounding, and conflating their self-identities. Moreover, for twins raised together, their senses of someoneness develop in a dyadic, coexistent mutuality, or sharing of place and space that actually begins before birth. It should come as no surprise that the academic literature, as well as popular imagination, depicts identical twins as living embodiments of two related questions: “What is truly other and what is self?” and “Is it possible to inhabit another person’s being?” (Neimark 1997, 3).
Situating Twinscapes
This is a book about situating twinscapes. Twinscapes refers not only to the visual resemblances of the surfaces of twins’ bodies, but also to their side-by-side appearance as a pair. This book is about twins who look alike and share space and place. As such, it focuses on twins whose physical likeness is so marked that their identities are easily confused by others.1Twinscapes as presented in this text also implies not only a view of two look-alike bodies but visions of hundreds or even thousands of twins attending twins festivals and performing their twinship for the gaze of others. Twinscapes as developed in Twins Talk also include identification and explanation of the various ways in which twins are subjected to the gaze of academic researchers as they in turn reflect popular or normative cultural ideals related to notions such as identity, autonomy, and mutuality. My aim is to go beyond the observations of researchers who objectify twins and view them as forever silent: frozen side by side in photographs, or reduced to their genes, particular body parts, or a series of testable independent and dependent variables. Many of the deeper questions of twinship, such as the possibilities of inhabiting each other’s being, of being betwixt and between, of being simultaneously unique and contingent, are raised in only a symbolically abstract or rhetorical sense (Farmer 1996). There is no voice for twins themselves, as agents of biosocial becoming (cf. Ingold and Pálsson 2013), in this research. How they, as twins, actively construct and negotiate their own twinscapes remains invisible, under the research radar, so to speak. As instruments or objects of research, even anthropologists tend to portray twins in terms of essentialized or generic cultural identities such as Ndembu twins in central Africa or twins in Haiti. Twinscapes, however, are actively situated or positioned within the twin dyad itself. In this view twinscapes illustrate twins’ own perspectives on themselves as twins in a “singleton” world. It includes the ways twins see how others view them and also their perceptions of each other. Twins’ views on living in and having identical bodies, on their twinship or relational bond, and on daily living with a cultural persona that is both lauded and ridiculed are not always in accord with the vision of twins researchers.
The purpose of this book is to show how identical twins, like the surprised Mulla, challenge commonplace notions of identity. Most books on twins deal with behavioral genetics, the psychology of twins, or how to best raise twins (Piontelli 2008); target audiences are other twins researchers, clinicians, educators, and parents of twins. As in the popular and scientific twin research literature, this book engages the biological/genetic and psychological/relational attributes of twins and twinship. Yet, when it comes to grappling with the “Who am I?” questions raised by twins, this book takes some innovative stances.
First, as the title states, Twins Talk seeks to capture the insider’s experiences of twinship. This study features and privileges twins’ own words about how they actively negotiate lifelong challenges raised by the “Who am I?” question. For identical twins, however, the “Who am I?” (as what is truly self and what is truly other) question hardly ends the story. Self-talk among identical twins also raises issues and questions of “Who are you?” “How are you me?” “How are you not me?” as well as “Who are we?” “How and when should I be me?” and “How and when should I be we?”
Second, I aim to present and analyze the positive as well as negative aspects of the twin experience that go beyond simple platitudes, such as “having a friend for life” or having a “special bond.” My focus is on the lived, grounded, day-to-day, and lifetime practical experiences and challenges of being twins. Third, if twins are a mirror of “us all” (cf. Wright 1997), then it is necessary to make the “us all” more explicit. If identical twins undermine our notions of a unique self, then what exactly is this unique self? In Twins Talk my aim is to subject Western culture to a critical analysis by comparing and contrasting the selving styles depicted in twins talk to self stylings across a variety of historical and cultural contexts.
Twin Research
Scientific perspectives on twins are at best ambivalent. Early nineteenth- century twins researchers (Cool 2007, 7) portrayed twins as both monsters and wonders existing at a tripartite nexus of horror, pleasure, and repugnance. Today, the fields of biology, biomedicine, and psychology dominate the scientific literature on twins. Issues of heredity, although going through a major paradigm shift, continue to dominate biological studies of twins (Charney 2012; Spector 2012). The older school of genetic determinism (Bouchard Jr. and Popling 1993; Galton 1875), viewing nuclear DNA as a blueprint for self, emphasized the genetic identicalness of twins as shared inherited traits rooted in or reducible to biology and little influenced by environmental factors. Emphasis is placed on sameness or being the same. Genetically identical twins in this modeling of genetic inheritance are referred to as clones (Wright 1997) or contemporary clones (Charney 2012; Prainsack and Spector 2006; Spector 2012). In contrast, the more recent emerging field of epigenetics (Charlemaine 2002; Peltonen 2007) focuses on heritable changes not due to structures of DNA but due to cellular mechanisms that turn genes off and on. Stressing genetic flexibility and adaptation, this postgenomic view focuses on inter-twin epigenetic differences—or what Spector (2012) terms twins who are identically different. Rather than differentiate between genes and environment, epigenetics moves away from the older ideas of genetic determinism and introduces news, more interactive ways of thinking about genes and their environment in terms of flexibility and adaptation (Charney 2012). Despite their differences, both paradigms present a gene-centered view aimed at discovering the hidden or subcellular life universes of twins.
If genetics reduces twins to their genes, biomedicine pathologizes twins by focusing on complications of pregnancy and birth for the mothers as well as the twins (Piontelli 2008). The twin relationship or bond is and has been a continual focus of twin research in the field of psychology. While their closely developed emotional ties or intense closeness (Klein 2003) may be celebrated as a unique dyadic capacity to understand and be understood (Bacon 2005; Piontelli 2008; Rosambeau 1987), psychologists tend to describe twins as somehow aberrant or compromised selves and as at risk for a wide range of psychological impairments (Conley 2004; Kamin 1994) and illnesses (Joseph 2004). Twins portrayed as genetically the same and as too close raise an interesting range of sociocultural issues about biological and psychological identity, as well as issues concerning autonomy and mutuality (Battaglia 1995a; Maddox 2006; Prainsack and Spector 2006; Prainsack, Cherkas, and Spector 2007). Like psychologists, sociologists are concerned with the development of a normative independent self and how the closeness and intimacy of twins may complicate identity both within the inter-twin relationship and twins’ relationships with the wider social worlds in which they live (Klein 2003). Anthropologists have tended to focus on twins, as a generic category, in terms of exotic attitudes, beliefs, and practices (such as ritual and infanticide) in faraway, non-Western cultures (Dorothy Davis 1971; Diduk 1993; Granzberg 1973; Lester 1986; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Stewart 2003; Turner 1967).
The notion that twins pose and encounter difficulties in the process of identity formation is as pervasive in popular culture as it is in science (Joseph 2004). Twins have been popularly portrayed as objects of wonder, fascination, and fear since the beginning of recorded history (Schave and Ciriello 1983; Klein 2003). Identical twins have been described as seeing double (Wagner 2003), as eerily similar (Neimark 1997), as “unwitting dancers choreographed by genes or fate” (Neimark 1997, 2), as individuality-burdened freaks of nature (Maddox 2006), and as a walking sideshow with four legs (Schave and Ciriello 1983). Twins are disparaged as having mutual or symbiotic identities, as being two halves of the same self (Neimark 1997), as being self
