(and ourselves), an emergent identity of being a militant twin.
The ITA: Touring Twins
Being relegated to the Research Pavilion at Twinsburg had isolated us from the daytime festival activities such as the parades, group photos, look-alike contests, and talent shows. After Twins Days, Dorothy and I wanted to have the full experience as participants at a twins festival. We also wanted to see if the twins talk we shared in the more formalized settings of Twinsburg also carried over to less formal settings. After Twins Days we decided to attend the International Twins Association meetings held at the end of summer 2003 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Although organized around similar activities the much smaller ITAs have a far different ambiance from Twins Days. The ITAs lack the funds and media savvy of the numerous Twins Days committees. Attendees at the ITAs know each other and renew their acquaintances every year, while Twins Days twins largely are and will remain strangers to each other. Twinsburg, with its thousands of attendees, is a kind of common interest activity. The ITAs, attended mainly by adult twins, is a common interest group. There are hardly any parents of young twins in attendance, and the media is neither a notable nor active presence. Twins Days, in contrast, treats twins more as a category of paired persons. Twins Days twins mill around a common ground while deciding as a twin pair which activities they will participate in or merely pass by. While evening parties and activities reveal that there are cliques composed of twins who have known each other over the years, the overwhelming majority of Twins Days twins will remain anonymous to each other. The ITAs are organized around formally scheduled activities in which all attendees are expected to participate. Unlike Twins Days, it is impossible to participate without registering. Wearing name tags, all attendees get to know each other. ITA attendees make an effort to introduce themselves to all the participants. While both festivals have an ecumenical Sunday church service, the more intimate and elderly oriented ITAs express a concern with the spirituality and well-being of the members. Unlike Twins Days with its permanent professional or semiprofessional organizers, each ITA meeting is organized by local sets of twins (or triplets) who live near the meeting site and put a great deal of time and effort into ensuring a successful festival. ITA leadership rotates among members, and each year’s conference organizers take on visible roles as hosts for all the weekend activities. Unlike the more cosmopolitan Twins Days and its attendant outsiders, there is no sense of “us” against “them.” At the Atlanta ITA, Dorothy and I discovered how pleasant it was to make friends with and hang out with other sets of twins. Over the three days we came to feel a mutual sense of affinity with the ITA twins that was strong enough to bring us back to another meeting.
The ITAs lack the wild party atmosphere of offsite events at the hotels in Twinsburg. Although welcoming and extremely sociable, the ITAs are not as much freaky or wild as they are wholesome fun. Even if the overall ambience of the ITAs is a bit different from that of Twins Days, which can be characterized as having an expressive disposition toward rebellion and revelry, the ITAs embody what Barbara Ehrenreich (2007), bemoaning the loss of ecstatic rituals, carnivals, and celebrations in Western tradition, describes in the title of her book as “collective joy.” Ehrenreich (2007, 11) is mainly concerned with public events, which she terms “ecstatic rituals,” as forms of collective excitement and festivity that place participants as liminal or marginal to the social order and result in a spontaneous sense of communion with one another. Ehrenreich also notes, however, that mind-altering states also may be more secularly understood as collective joy or having fun. While I would not describe ITA events as generating mind-altering experiences, spontaneous moments of joy, happiness, elation, excitement, and exhilaration—in the form of shared and sustained giggling—are certainly part of the communal ITA twin experience.
Maybe it is because I am an academic and we all take ourselves too seriously, but what has been largely absent from my adult life are moments of extreme silliness. I remember them well from adolescence, when Dorothy and I, in the company of friends, would get silly and laugh until we lost our breath, shed tears, or worse. I treasure those few and far between incidents that encourage super silliness. In my fieldwork in remote fishing communities in Newfoundland and northern Norway, I found those moments to occur among groups of adult women with far more frequency than was the case in my own adult life. At the ITA events, unacquainted twins do not remain strangers for long; the personal identities of all participants become eroded by the nightly hilarious, but humiliating and undignified, activities in which they participate. It is these activities, and the conviviality that emerges from them, that I situate my analysis of the ITAs as public events.
ITA organizers and participants take having fun to the point of absurdity, in a way that both is extremely entertaining and creates a sense of collective intimacy among participating twins, who suspend their own sense of dignified individuality or sense of self to join in a playful collective celebration of twinness. The ITA revels in (nonalcoholic) silliness as a kind of high hilarity. At the ITAs already liminal selves—twins—commune and make merry. Every night is dress-up night. Twins dress according to themes chosen by each venue. At Asheville’s Hollywood night, triplet Bill Clinton doppelgangers elicited hysterical laughter as they worked the crowd, flirting with all the women. Skits and talent contests performed by acquaintances, who may or may not be all that talented, elicit shared audience laughter, as do more professional shows where a hypnotist amuses the audience with the antics of hypnotized twins. But it is the silly games that lead most participants to hysterically shared laughter. Participants at the ITAs are a rather conservative and sedate group. (For example, no one in our age group dressed as hippies for High School Night.) In addition, religious ceremonies and a nonecstatic spiritual element of camaraderie prevail at the ITAs. Nonetheless, the satirical and sexually suggestive behavior that does exist is more potent precisely because it is perceived as naughty. For example, one game in Atlanta involved two teams. One team consisted of participants holding rolls of toilet paper between their legs; the other team held toilet plungers between their legs. The aim was to put the plunger into the tissue roll hole. Nobody was very good at this and it became most amusing. Not all games are sexual parodies. Trivia games exaggerated personalities as they pitted teams of twins against each other. Although such high jinks and high times may not be the kinds of ecstatic experience that Ehrenreich (2007) attributes to festivals in the Middle Ages, they are certainly shared, high-spirited good times. As such, it is not so much twins at play with twinship (as at Twins Days), as twins at play.
The Public Faces of Twinship
The idea of twinscapes becomes quite literal at festivals where hundreds or even thousands of twins of all ages gather to celebrate their twinship by performing society’s stereotype of them. Even very different-looking DZ twins dress alike. As the Twins Days website advises and as Steph and Jenna learned, getting into the festival spirit means dressing alike and looking alike as much as possible. Yet twins, as we have seen, are envisioned differently by the different types of festival participants. These include twins, researchers, festival organizers, the general public, and the media. In this chapter I have described different perspectives on twins festivals that reflect a variety of combinations and permutations of insider (twins) and outsider (singleton) perspectives. Festivals also exhibit a number of discordant attributes that the wider society accords twins. Festival twins as a kind of deviant persona are positively viewed for their companionate, shared identities as well as for their mutual understanding and interpersonal closeness. Yet it is also these same features that characterize twins as a deviant persona in a negative way. While the insider twin’s view celebrates the positive, the media tends to express the negative. An extreme example of the negative perspective is illustrated by Maddox’s (2006, 66) popular science depiction of Twinsburg as a freak show. He writes, “You can’t be an individual and like being twins; you can’t be twins and, you know, want to be like the rest of us: all alone and unique and, you know, individual.” At Twinsburg and the ITAs, however, for two days twins embrace and celebrate the positive dimensions of their cultural persona as they act out or perform society’s stereotypes of identical and paired best friends for life. Certainly festival twins buy into society’s stereotypes by going over the top or exaggerating their twinship. But, perhaps more importantly, they also celebrate what Maddox would see as a counternorm: they are not alone, they are not
