The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently offer the spectacle of twins who share an insular closeness and perform a supposed alikenessstanding side by side, speaking and acting in unison. Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines the historical narrativewithin the discourses of experimentation, aberrance and eugenicsand how it has shaped their representations in the 20th and 21st centuries.
"Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines their historical narrative--embedded within discourses of aberrance, experimentation and eugenics--and how it has shaped their public and personal representations in the 20th and 21st centuries"--
The author analyzes representations of twins in American literature and popular culture, focusing on the performance of their supposed identicalness and strange intimacy and arguing for a predominant cultural imagining of twins as freakish and singular in their similarity. She examines the relationship between twins' lived experience and cultural representations of it and argues that the historical narrative of twins in the US, based on discourses of the "freak," experimentation, and racial eugenics, informs and shapes fictional ones. She considers how photographic, literary, and popular culture representations of twins portray them as a freakish spectacle of similarity and intimacy, including in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding, Joyce Carol Oates' The Lives of the Twins, Marcy Demansky's Twins, Shelley Jackson's Half Life, How I Met Your Mother, Twinning, and American Horror Story: Freak Show; narrative intersections of twins, race, and cultural difference in which twinship serves as a trope to explore questions of national/cultural affiliation and racial kinship, particularly in William Melvin Kelley's dem, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Lucy Fitch Perkins' Twins series; how representations of twinship in juvenile culture reveals shifts in the US culture and economy of family, in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's products; and twins' rhetoric about their lived experiences, to understand how they may perpetuate or challenge the cultural narrative of twinship. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
