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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.
Roland Barthes writes in Mythologies, “The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is done now by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters.” Twins, with their shape-shifting talents, have occupied both of these roles in human history. In the ancient Indo-European world, they appeared as the multicultural Divine Twins, astral-equestrian aiders of humanity and saviors of shipwrecked sailors. In the early twentieth century, they starred as one of the best-known trademarks in American advertising: Goldie and Dustie, the mascots of Gold Dust washing powder. Physically, cognitively, emotionally, agentially, twins tend not to see or treat each other (to quote the writer Helen Garner on humans more generally) as “discrete bubbles floating past each other and sometimes colliding.” Instead they “overlap, seep into each other’s lives, penetrate the fabric of each other.” Twins also show how appealing this alternative conception of personhood is.
If you ask people why twins make them doubt their own freedom, they’re most likely to point to the results of twin studies. In 1875, Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton noted the scientific usefulness of single-egg twins being genetically identical. It follows, Galton pointed out, that any differences between a pair of them can’t be explained by differences in their genes, but must be due to variation in their environments. Thomas Bouchard, who ran the famous Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart in the 1980s, has called the twin method “the Rosetta Stone of behavioral genetics,” allowing scientists a godlike reach into the previously hidden roots of human features and behavior. Stories of twins separated at birth sometimes inspire existential claustrophobia, sometimes moral panic. Other times, they bring on a feeling akin to grief. This comes up in Identical Strangers, a memoir co-written by twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein.
If asked directly, most people would deny that they consider twins a metaphysical unit, but their behavior often suggests they’re inclined in that direction. A standard assumption of modern Western culture is that each person is physically discrete, cleanly distinguished from all other people by their location, solo, within an unbroken continuum of skin. Conjoined twins share a single body, so this line of thought implies they’re a single person. The ancient Greek picture of persons as essentially disembodied minds housed in unruly bodies was adopted wholesale by Christianity, continued to be popular through the early modern period and the Enlightenment, and persisted in a fractured and ambivalent way through many of the intellectual movements of the twentieth century. For those of us who aren’t conjoined twins, and who don’t sign up for the Wari view that personhood tracks exchanges of physical substances, embodied personhood seems to mean metaphysical isolation.
In this book, Helena de Bres - a twin herself - argues that twinhood is a unique lens for examining our place in the world and how we relate to other people. Deftly weaving together literary and cultural history, philosophical enquiry and personal experience, de Bres examines such thorny issues as binary thinking, objectification, romantic love and friendship, revealing the limits of our individualistic perspectives. In this illuminating, entertaining book, wittily illustrated by her twin sister, de Bres ultimately suggests that to consider twinhood is to imagine the possibility of a more interconnected, capacious human future. In 1875, Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton noted the scientific usefulness of single-egg twins being genetically identical. It follows, Galton pointed out, that any differences between a pair of them can’t be explained by differences in their genes, but must be due to variation in their environments. Twins have been used in many times and places for intellectual purposes, as tools to think with. In art and myth, they’re employed as symbols of duality, wholeness, trickiness, creativity, social conflict, and perfect or pathological love, and as ways to explore distinctions between self and other, mind and body, male and female, and similarity and difference, period. Twins are also objects of desire within the entertainment industry and the consumer market more broadly.
The author’s favorite picture of twins is John Tenniel’s illustration of Tweedledum and Tweedledee for Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The scene deftly captures three core aspects of identical twinhood. For one thing, it features two people who look strikingly alike. Much of the experience of twinhood is determined not by twinship itself but the response of non-twins to it. Tweedledum and Tweedledee live in Wonderland, a place peopled by the odd, unpredictable, seductive, and unhinged. Twins vividly breach some of the central physical, cognitive, and emotional boundaries we assume hold between individual people. One reason twins seem unusually interconnected is the intense emotional bond they often share. The social role of the traditional freak show, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has argued, was to reassure audiences of their own normality, beauty, and virtue.
Twins have been used in many times and places for intellectual purposes, as tools to think with. In art and myth, they’re employed as symbols of duality, wholeness, trickiness, creativity, social conflict, and perfect or pathological love, and as ways to explore distinctions between self and other, mind and body, male and female, and similarity and difference, period. In science, twins are central to behavioral genetics and clinical medical trials. Singletons also use twins, or at least the idea of twins, for more emotional purposes. Twins are also objects of desire within the entertainment industry and the consumer market more broadly. Across Britain, Europe, and America, conjoined twins were exhibited at fairs, circuses, theaters, and museums as “living curiosities,” alongside mutant animals, fat women, non-Westerners, intersex people, and those with unusual heights, prominent breasts and asses, or simply a lot of hair.
Ancient Greek and North American myth twins, for instance, are often produced by their mother’s sleeping with different fathers, one mortal, one divine, in quick succession. The most charged contrast isn’t between the Strong Twin and the Weak Twin, but between the Good and the Evil Twin. Iroquois mythology gives us Good Mind, who scatters attractive and delicious items over the earth’s surface for human use. The inability to distinguish twins from each other may also trigger a still more personal anxiety in singletons. The delusion of “clonal pluralization of the self” is the belief that the world contains multiple copies of oneself that are both physically and psychologically identical. Twins aren’t the only objects of binary thinking, though, so likely something more general is going on, too. Psychologists have suggested that binarization doesn’t only serve the personal needs of individual twins, but also the needs of their twinship.
In this chapter, Jared Holley questions Andrea Sangiovanni’s account of the role of solidarity in the late nineteenth-century French colonial context. He argues that it exhibits a ‘methodological nationalism’ such that solidarity is worked out as a response to and engagement with solely domestic issues, for example, the class conflict endemic to the Third Republic in which solidarism was born. Holley believes this is a mistake because it obscures how solidarity emerged in part as a response to and in engagement with a much more international, colonial context.
In this chapter, Sally Scholz urges Andrea Sangiovanni to conceive of solidarity less as a kind of action and more as a transformative set of relationships that evolve over time. Rather than merely act in solidarity, she suggests what is needed is for us to live in solidarity. She claims that solidarity is transformative in two senses: internal and external. It is externally transformative in the sense that it aims at radical societal and political change. It is internally transformative in the sense that it encourages us to rethink and rework our relationships to ourselves and to others. With respect to ourselves, being in solidarity compels us to overcome bias, prejudice, isolation, and self-interest; with respect to others, being in solidarity sparks care, concern, and mutual understanding while also generating the possibility of new kinds of cooperative association.