Helena de Bres
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Are You Two in Love?
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The idea of ideal love as a terrestrial twin was driven underground by Christianity—human hearts were meant to find their rest in God—but resurfaced and reached its peak in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Twins clearly function as metaphors for singleton romantic relationships in the Platonic myth, and as Alice Dreger points out, many a love song can be read as a covert analogy to conjoined twins. In Western culture, the myth of twinship—actual twinship—as the ideal human relationship takes its most famous form in the story of Castor and Pollux. The cultural heritage of the West contains two visions of the perfect human relationship: one centering romantic couples, one—lower profile, but still potent—centering twins. Queerness presents a much more radical challenge to the social order than twinhood does. The amatonormative ideal includes queer romantic couples as much as straight ones, at least where queer partners can marry or establish a marriage-like relationship.

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How to Be Multiple

The Philosophy of Twins

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