Dorothy’s yoga instructor chose to play the game.8The anthropologist Don Handelman (1990) would refer to our twin moment as a proto-event—an event that just happens, as opposed to an intentionally designed or organized activity. For Dorothy and me, the performance of twinship probably echoes countless times in our shared, brown-haired childhood when we behaved in a similar fashion. In one sense, it is an old habit of self styling that has lain dormant, buried during all the years we have lived apart. As such, it was a kind of performance that was improvised, created, or recreated in the flow of activity. Like models who pose for the camera, listening to the photographer’s constant mantra of “work it, work it, sell it, sell it,” Dorothy and I strut our individual and collective selves. This single incident of performing the twin game sets the scene for the analysis that follows. Our seemingly spontaneous and playful performance has an agentive quality in that we refashion ourselves, for the moment, in our own ways according to our own logics (cf. Szerzynski, Heim, and Waterton 2003).
Being repeat performers of the twin game, however, did little to prepare us for the combination of the specula and spectacular twinscapes presented at twins festivals. For twins, acting the part at twins festivals is all about having fun, making fun, and seeing and being seen. Festival twins create themselves as walking, talking, and embodied personifications of a deviant, culturally imagined type of self. As cultural performances and public events, twins festivals are a type of turnabout or rite of reversal where, for a couple of days a kind of full-blown pan-twinness rules. Twins become the norm, and singletons the exotic other.
Acting the Part
The dramatic potential of an identical twin pair has not been overlooked in popular culture. Twins sell products, twins can be actors or celebrities, and giving birth to twins has become trendy among Hollywood celebrities. We all probably have firsthand knowledge of at least one or two twin pairs. Yet imagine yourself set down among thousands of twin pairs. Our private proto-event becomes writ large, public and pro forma, at twins festivals where twinscapes are staged to include hundreds or even thousands of twins who gather together to play the twin game. Festivals are not just about one pair of twins working it; they are about twins en masse working it. Almost every state in the union has a twins festival that is open to twins and other multiples. Scheduled on weekends and announced on websites, some are held annually and some biannually. They are open to twins of all ages. Some festivals, like those in Nebraska, are attended by only eight to ten sets of twins, while the largest, in Ohio, attracts thousands annually. As organized public events, festivals include games, contests, parties, and parades. The media are always welcome at these events.
Performance
“Culture exists in performance” (Hastrup 1995a, 78), and festival twinscapes, where twins self-style as physically identical, pose a kind of in-your-face assault on the Western notion of individualism. Twins festivals as public events have all the trappings of carnival and spectacle. Whether or not you are a twin, twins festivals are a visually stunning and spectacular experience. Yet twins festivals are more than just about seeing and being seen; they are about seeing double. A large part of festival activity consists of a kind of Brownian motion of a seemingly endless number of matched people pairs. Identically dressed twin pairs mill around the festival and participate in contests, games, and parades. Twins festivals provide opportunities to investigate cultures in action (MacAloon 1984a) and are examples of society “cutting out a piece of itself from itself for inspection” (Turner quoted in Stoeltje 1978, 450). The public and an exaggerated performance of twinship at twins festivals offers some interesting insights into the components of a twin’s self, as well as twins’ selves.
While other chapters focus on biological and psychological dynamics and development of mutuality and identity within or inside of the twin pair, the goal of this chapter is to depict a more public, collective face of twinship. Festival twins become constructors and actors in their own dramas. They act out scripts and codes that directly and indirectly challenge the hierarchies or ideologies of self and personhood that discipline the world in which they live (Szerzsynski et al. 2003). At festivals twins perform multiple selfways, including their deviant personae in both a negative and a positive sense. Festival twins, who assemble at a common location to play with appearances and who celebrate and publicly perform their twinship, both attract and repel outside observers. By emphasizing or parodying their physical resemblance to each other, festival twins deliberately transgress conventional notions about individualism as naturally based in the distinctiveness of each individual’s embodied identity. But festival twins also celebrate different or alternative dimensions of human relatedness. They promote togetherness over autonomy. They revel in a sense of mutuality or connection to each other. Twins festivals may thus be viewed not only as statements of personal, interpersonal, and collective relationships and identities but also as embodied rites of resistance or reversal. In this chapter I use the cultural psychology approach (Markus et al. 1997; Neisser 1997; Ortner 2006; Shweder 1991) to examine how self and culture mutually construct each other, as festival twins cultivate a shared dyadic bodily aesthetic and a unique connection to each other.
Twins Festivals as Public Events and Cultural Performance
Performance theorists use terms like cultural performance, social drama, spectacle, carnival, festival, rite of resistance, and public ritual to refer to culturally designed forms of organized, expressive, collective social gatherings, activities, or experiences (MacAloon 1984a). Although I prefer the term festival, I will also follow Handelman’s (1990) lead by employing the more inclusive term public event. Although Twins Days is referred to as a festival and the ITAs are referred to as conventions, both celebrations of twinship fit the criteria for a public event. Public events involve active and interactive performances that are amenable to direct observation. They are real, discrete, and bounded events that take place at specific times and locations. As dramatic and expressive experiences, public events engage the senses (Handelman 1990). Twins festivals as public events are times of celebration and satirical high humor that give primacy to sensory, visual codes (Handelman 1990). As public events, mass public performances of twinship may be described as having a paradoxical quality. Festival twins play with appearances. Twins at festivals enact what Laderman and Roseman (1992, 9) refer to as “archetypal personalities.” Stereotypes of twins involve more than just being identical. By enjoying a festival’s events together, twins also express their sense of connection and mutuality.
Festival twins act not only to become objects of fascination; they aim to elicit shock and wonder. Public events may challenge social order or reconfirm the normative as they present alternatives and new utopian models of social reality or heighten awareness of multiple realities that already exist (Clark 2005; Ehrenreich 2007; Handelman 1990; Kapferer 1984; Laderman and Roseman 1992; MacAloon 1984a; Morris 1994; Rapport and Overing 2000; Stoeltje 1978; Turner 1984). Festival twinscapes offer a kind of identity couvade (Josephides 2010)—a chance to “freak the mundane”—where twins rule and singletons become the exotic other. At festivals, twins can emerge as weird and scary, if not threatening or even dangerous. Adult twins, dressed alike and meandering around festival grounds and venues side by side or even hand in hand perform a version of what Bakhtin (cited in Morris 1994), referring to festivals, calls the grotesque, exaggerated, or transgressive body (or, in this case, body pair). Twins performing twinship represent both structure and antistructure. They mock and they celebrate. They are betwixt and between—a special condition in the world that simultaneously embodies unity and duality (cf. Turner 1985). Twins invert the norms and override or reverse everyday distinctions and categories. The low may be exalted and the mighty abased. Another space is created (Lindholm 2001) in which festival twins not only perform a counterhegemonic act of resistance to outside moldings of their personality but also set forth alternative values and more relational styles of personhood, where twinship becomes desired, if not necessarily normalized, in the process.
Twinsburg’s Twins Days Festival and the International Twins Association Conventions
Although both fit Handelman’s (1990) criteria for a public event, Twinsburg’s Twins Days and the International Twins Association meetings are distinctive types of twins festivals. Twins
