(Kamin 1974).
Fault Lines and Deviant Persona
Whether characterized as an unsettling presence or exceptional exceptions, identical twins may be viewed as what anthropologists have described as a kind of deviant cultural persona (Holland and Leander 2004, 279) or as located on the fault lines (Conklin and Morgan 1996) of identity.2These concepts will become central to my analysis in Twins Talk. First, the notion of fault lines helps explicate the “us” and “who” as in Wright’s (1997) What Twins Tell Us about Who We Are, or what exactly is the customary order that twins cause a rift in (Neimark 1997). Identical twins exist on the fault lines to the extent that they challenge, confound, or deviate from normative expectations about self, personhood, and identity. Twins challenge natural assumptions that every individual’s body is biologically distinct and unique. For example, Herdt (1999) asks his readers to imagine what a sense of self would be like—as among the mirror-less Sambia he describes—if you have never seen your own face and only see yourself reflected in the faces of others. Yet, for identical twins, there is actually someone else walking around with “your” face and body. In addition, identical twins, in terms of their relationship within the twin dyad, also embody and enact a series of tensions or dialectical qualities of identity held to be characteristic of Western culture. In the spirit of Mulla’s question, “If you are me, then who am I?” (Lindholm 2001, 3), identical twins bridge dualisms of same and different, autonomy and mutuality, separate and connected, and self and other, as well as you and me and us and them. Farmer (1996) philosophically refers to this as a kind of symbolic double duality.
From a more practical perspective, twins have to live in a singleton-dominated world where their respective identities can become confused or conflated and their relationship or twinship, rooted in long-term intimate sharing of space and place, is denigrated more than praised. Twins are not only located on the fault lines; they live on the fault lines. In this sense, identical twins constitute a cultural persona as they collaborate to interactively microproduce and perform a twin identity and position their selves as twins (Holland and Leander 2004) both vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis the wider singleton-]dominated world in which they live. Mol (2003) describes identical twins as embodying a kind of fluid space where boundaries are not always demarcated and bonds between the elements (self/other) are not always stable. But stereotypical portraits of twins, passively embodying fluid space or existing on the fault lines, fail to see or incorporate an insider’s perspective. Identical twins are active agents in their own experiential worlds. As twins they interrogate, oftentimes rather militantly, commonsense assumptions of what it means to be a person. In so doing, they advocate and enact alternative models of identity, relation, and selfhood within the wider domains of Western culture. Twins’ own twinscapes provide an interesting perspective for consideration of how personhood may be worked through the body in thought and action as well as how images of the body serve as enactments of the social and moral ethos (Conklin and Morgan 1996; Csordas 1994). Identical twins offer an opportunity to examine a multiplicity of constructions and lived experiences of self and other in terms of intracultural diversity as well as in a comparative, cross-cultural context.
In writing this book, I am acutely aware that writing about famous or freaky twins sells books. Audiences and readers want to hear or read stuff about twins that confirms their weirdest stereotypes of them. I am frequently contacted by popular journalists looking for interesting angles on twins. Recently a BBC documentary producer contacted me to ask if I had any “really weird twins in my sample.” She gave me an example of two twin women in Holland who had never married and lived together all their lives. The filmmaker was interested in any cases I might know of schizophrenic twins or other twins who were abnormally bonded. When I told her my work was with normal twins and my goal was to normalize twinship, she expressed no further interest in my studies. In the stereotypical view that this particular filmmaker wants to pursue, twins are not straddling the fault lines, they have fallen over the cliff; they are not deviating from an established norm, but are beyond the pale altogether.
At the same time, however, twins are also a more common phenomenon. Globally, today, there are over eleven million identical twins (Spector 2012). Although twins are exoticized in many ways, most of us have firsthand, personal knowledge of twins. A friend, neighbor, schoolmate, or coworker may well be a twin or have twins in the family. Oftentimes, when I lecture about twins, someone in the audience will respond with something to the effect that “My daughter has three sets of twins in her elementary school and really, they have none of the identity issues you describe. All the other kids know who they are and can tell them apart. Really, it’s no big deal.” During my first in-class lecture on twins, a student raised her hand and said, “I’m a twin and really, I don’t find myself or other twins all that scary or creepy.” Clearly, day-to-day acquaintances and personal interactions with twins both normalize twinship and elucidate and resolve a series of identity issues for those closely associated with them. What remains unspoken and underanalyzed, and probably is not so obvious unless you are a twin yourself (as my student’s comment illustrates), is the active roles that twins take on, individually and together, to “educate or socialize” singletons on how to deal with the identity issues that they raise. Jenna, a participant in this study, makes this patently clear:
Jenna: There are more differences in twins than what people who are not twins just don’t understand. They think we look the same so we are the same. We’re not. We’re different people. And they don’t get that concept. I think it’s why twins zero in on the differences, because everyone else sees them as being so similar. We’re not. And people get us mixed up and I’m like, Hello!
Twins raised in Western society are like the singleton majority and different from it. Twins Talk is about how twins go about normalizing, expressing, and performing their identity and relationship vis-à-vis other sets of twins and how they utilize their twinship to reconfigure “normality” and navigate their own selfways (Neisser 1997), or characteristic ways of being twins in the singleton world. “Like, Hello!” as voiced by Jenna, implies the roles twins must take on as they challenge the stereotypes that singletons may have about twins. All twins do this. To the extent that they are together, they do it pretty much all the time. This I call self work (Goodman 2008) or self styling. Self work is a complex business because it involves both actions as individuals and actions as twins. Poised on or viewed from the fault lines, twins embody selfways that both integrate their selves into wider, normative selfways and mark them as deviant. Singletons and the dominant culture hold stereotypes or characterizations of identical twins that identical twins both buy into and challenge with their own counterhegemonic self stylings. In so doing twins also take an active and interactive role in the “process of ‘selving’” (Markus, Mullally, and Kitayama 1997, 13). By self styling I mean that once having adopted or established their mutual and individual identities, twins act to maintain the integrity of those identities (Neisser 1988, 36). Thus, being located on the fault lines, combating stereotypes, presenting alternative self stylings, while all the time “fitting in,” requires a great deal of self work on the part of twins.
Self working is part of the practical experiences of twinship, often noted by researchers, but never (Prainsack et al. 2007) investigated in any detail. Located on the fault lines of society, identical twins’ self working both confirms and challenges stereotypes and both bridges and delineates the dualisms of the wider society. Twins self-work as they go about answering Mulla’s “Who am I?” question.
Twinscapes and Cultural Psychology
Twinscapes are multifaceted, complex, and positioned. The concepts of self work, self styling, and selfways come from the school of cultural psychology. Identical twins, like all other humans, are both natural and social beings. Twins are not monolithic, and it would certainly be misguided to reduce them to their twinship. Their sense of personal and interpersonal identity and experience of twinship is, in turn, embedded in a wider sociocultural context that is also characterized by a great deal of diversity.
A cultural psychology3 approach works well in the discussion of twinscapes, precisely because it is so multifaceted and recognizes multiple
