Twins in Society: Parents, Bodies, Space and Talk (Studies in Childhood and Youth)

Twins in Society

Studies in Childhood and Youth Titles include: Kate Bacon TWINS IN SOCIETY Parents, Bodies, Space and Talk Allison James, Anne Trine Kjørholt and Vebjørg Tingstad (editors) CHILDREN, FOOD AND IDENTITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

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Twins in Society Parents, Bodies, Space and Talk Kate Bacon Lecturer in Sociology, University of Central Lancashire, UK

© Kate Bacon 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 –10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–58093–0

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For Hannah and Helen

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Contents List of Figures and Tables

viii

Acknowledgements

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1 Introduction: Situating Twins in Society

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Part I Structuring Contexts 2 Discourses

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3 Parents

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Part II Agency Contexts 4 Bodies

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5 Space

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6 Talk

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7 Conclusions: Moving Through Life as a Twin

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Appendix A

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Appendix B

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures and Tables Figure 2.1 From ‘becoming’ to ‘being’ Figure 2.2 The continuum of siblingship

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Figure 4.1 ‘Me and my twin’ – by Emma, aged 13

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Figure 4.2 ‘Me and my twin’ – by Ruth, aged 13

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Figure 5.1 ‘My bedroom’ – by Emma, aged 13 (pseudonyms added)

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Figure 5.2 ‘My bedroom’ – by Adam, aged 16 (pseudonyms added)

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Figure 5.3 ‘What life would be like if I wasn’t a sister to twins’ – by Ellie, aged 12

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Figure 5.4 ‘Being a twin’ – by Charlotte, aged 15

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Figure 5.5 ‘Being a twin’ – by Hannah, aged 15

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Figure 5.6 ‘Being a twin’ – by Ash, aged eight

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Figure 5.7 ‘What life would be like if I wasn’t a twin’ – by Harry, aged eight

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Figure 5.8 ‘Being a twin’ – by Olivia, aged 16 (pseudonyms added)

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Table A.1

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List of participants

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the project ‘Twinship and the Negotiation of Social Identity in Britain’ which forms the basis of this book. That project and this book would not have been possible without the participation of the twins, parents and siblings who took part. I am grateful to them for sharing their accounts with me and for making me welcome in their homes. All the names (apart from those of my own family) used in the book are pseudonyms, some chosen by the children themselves. I also want to thank TAMBA for helping me to locate some of the twins. Thanks to my colleagues, friends and family who have supported me in writing this book. Allison for her enduring mentorship and encouragement, Hannah for her love, patience and companionship, Keith for his constant support and constant reading, Mum and Dad for their faith and always pushing me forward, Helen for her love, care and conversation, Sal for helping me to visualise my argument and offering guidance throughout the journey, and Tom for keeping the good ship a-sailing.

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1 Introduction: Situating Twins in Society

What does it mean to be a twin? How do twins define who they are and what expectations do other people have of twins? As these questions indicate, twinship is much more than just a biological status. Ideas about twins – who they are, how we should treat them – emerge within society. This book offers a social analysis of twinship, that is, it seeks to uncover the social character of twinship. Using data from a small-scale qualitative research project, it explores the social meanings attributed to twinship and explores how twins negotiate their identities as they ‘grow up’. I became interested in the topic of twinship for both personal and academic reasons. Aside from the fact that I have always had an academic interest in the topic of identity, I am a twin. This is a statement that captures more than just how medical professionals classified my (and my twin’s) body. It also refers to how I often think about myself. Given that the topic of this book is twinship, it seems both fair and necessary for me to say something about my own experience of being a twin. Throughout my life, my family have told me that I am a non-identical twin. Yet, despite this, I have become increasingly aware of how others immediately assume that we are identical twins. To this day, people find it difficult to tell us apart. I sometimes find this hard to understand. How can others think we look so similar when I think that we look different? In my mind, we have different body shapes, different faces and different ways of walking and dressing. However, in reality, I sometimes find it difficult to tell us apart in photos.

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At present, we are working at different universities. When we find the time to meet up, however, I am often made aware of my twin identity. A research journal note explains: On Friday, Hannah [my twin sister] and I ventured out to the pub. Hannah was waiting to be served. The barman gave me the drinks and asked me for the money. I looked over to Hannah in an attempt to suggest that she had been the person ordering the drinks, and he said, ‘Oh’ and asked her for the money. For me, it was important that the barman acknowledged that he had got us mixed up. Indeed, being acknowledged as ‘individuals’ is important to me. Like some of the twins I talked with, when given the opportunity, I chose to dress differently from my twin sister. For a time, when we were younger, I would not let her borrow any of my clothes. I also found it difficult sharing a room with her and spending most of my time at secondary school in the same classes. I wanted to escape from what others always seemed to assume was my ‘other-half’. She was always less concerned about making such statements of individuality and was saddened by my attempts to avoid being seen with her. Today, on those occasions when we are together, we do swap clothes, but we rarely venture out wearing the same outfits. However, on some occasions we have met up wearing similar clothes: I see her coming around the corner and my first thought is the shock at what she is wearing. She looks like me. She is wearing her long black coat, black trousers and heeled boots. She looks more ‘posh’ than usual. I always think of her as trendy and me as the smart one of the two. I am wearing my long black coat, jeans and shoes (Journal note). Interestingly, I use the phrase ‘one of the two’ to conceptualise this difference, suggesting that, together, our different ‘parts’ form a cohesive unit. Another layer of difference was brought to my attention by two of the child twins in this study, who asked me to draw a picture of my sister and I together. I drew Hannah wearing trousers and me wearing a skirt. The ‘feminine’/‘tomboy’ distinction that I sought to capture is one that emerges from a more general family narrative of the differences between Hannah and me. However, whilst it is true that I wear skirts more often than Hannah, I do not wear them often; it is actually more likely that we both wear trousers! What is striking, then, is the way in which I choose to emphasise certain elements of difference in order to assert my individuality.

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Since much of my daily life is spent in the absence of my twin, my friends and colleagues only occasionally see us together. Although many now know that we are twins, this does not prevent them from being intrigued at the sight of us together. Without invitation, strangers also continue to make themselves known to us and ask us questions. This kind of public attention was withheld from our other sibling, Helen, causing her to feel relatively unimportant and invisible. The importance that being a twin sometimes has for me (albeit in different contexts and at different times) represents one important position from which the accounts given in this book emerge.

Social interest in twins Twins, like everyone else, are embedded within the social relationships and cultural beliefs which constitute the societies in which they live, and they make and re-make their identities within this context. Within Europe and the USA, twins are a source of public interest, celebration and sometimes anxiety. Twins clubs (such as the Australian Multiple Births Association and the UK-based Twins and Multiple Births Association) and specifically targeted ‘twin’ parenting guides offer advice and guidance to parents of twins. Alongside this, twin festivals (such as the famous Twinsburg festival in Ohio, USA), twin-to-twin dating agencies, twin-only restaurants (run by twins for twins) and companies that provide children with their own, specially made ‘twinned’ dolls (which resemble them) reveal the ‘special’ status that we accord twinship. Within Western societies, interest in twins seems to be on the increase. Not only are twins more common (due to fertility treatments like IVF, the better survival rate of premature babies and the tendency for mothers to have children later on in life) but, in the face of public concerns over cloning and the pressure to be ‘somebody’ rather than just ‘anybody’, they force us to think about what makes us unique as human beings. Yet social fascination with twins is not new. Twins have occupied a central position within cultural rituals and mythology. Although accepted as normal for animals, the birth of two offspring at once is more unusual for human beings and also undermines the primogeniture system that has been adopted in many societies. As Turner (1969: 49) argues, where kinship is structurally significant, the event of two being born at once can disrupt notions of seniority, birth order and related kinship roles. Whilst two are born at once, there may only be one place for them to occupy in society. Twins can therefore present societies with a classificatory problem because ‘what is physically double is structurally single’ (Turner, 1969: 45).

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Possibly, then, it is no surprise to find that many cultural beliefs and mythical accounts of twins have been characterised by tales of twin rivalry; a reflection of the contest for primacy (firstborn status) and also twins’ physical struggle for survival (Beit-Hallahmi and Paluszny, 1974). For instance, the Yamba (of Cameroon, Africa) believe that when twins cry a lot or one twin gains more weight than the other, this means that the twins are locked in a state of rivalry. They believe that this will intensify as the twins get older and could potentially result in the weaker twin succumbing and eventually dying. A twin specialist is therefore called in to ‘fix’ the twins in order that they may live in harmony (Guffler, 1996: 36). In the biblical tale of Jacob and Esau, Jacob steals the birthright from his brother Esau and the blessing of his father which is intended for his firstborn son. In the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, Romulus kills his brother Remus after a quarrel about where they should build their new city of Rome (Corney, 1977). Through ritual, myth and legends, cultures have devised ways of adjusting to the threatening event of twin birth (Corney, 1977). For instance, whilst some societies have put one or both twins to death (thereby getting rid of the classificatory problem), others have attributed them with a special status, such as regarding them as ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’ (Turner, 1969: 46). Indeed, what is striking from the various anthropological accounts of cultural attitudes towards twins is that whilst in some cases twins are abhorred and put to death, in others they are connected to the spirit world and viewed more favourably. For instance, in some cultures, twins may be seen as signs of adultery and sin. Two children must mean two fathers. This notion of ‘double paternity’ is reflected in the Greek myth of Castor and Pollux. In some versions, Zeus (God) fathers Pollux and Helen, and Yyndareus fathers Castor, hence one twin has a human father whilst the other has a divine father (see Stewart, 2003 for a more detailed overview of this myth). In some cultures, this assumption of dual paternity is linked to allegations of infidelity. Thus, Corney (1977) notes that in medieval Europe, mothers of twins were suspected of having been unfaithful to their husbands. In other cases the mother’s display of excessive fecundity can lead to the killing of twins. The Yoruba of Nigeria are widely known to have killed twins in the past. Although the influences of Christianity and Islam have now led to a more general acceptance of twins, the Yoruba would smother one or both twins and the parents would be quarantined until ritually cleansed (Chappel, 1974; Schwartz, 1998). During the early colonial period, the Onitsha (south-east Nigeria) exposed twins (and sometimes their mother as well) to the elements because they

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were thought to embody aspects of animalistic reproduction, signified through the event of twin birth (Bastian, 2001). In contrast to these examples, among the Lele (of the former Congo), twins signify special honour. The Lele believe that since no one begets a child without the consent of the spirits, parents of twins (who produce two offspring at once) have been specially honoured. Although this means that parents of twins are classed with animals (because they produce in multiples), the immense fecundity of animals is the only way in which they are perceived as superior to humans. Parents of twins thus enjoy high ritual status within their communities (Douglas, 1967). In the Nuer society (of north-east Africa), twins are also generally viewed in a positive way. According to Evans-Pritchard ([1956] 1977), the Nuer conceptualise twins as ‘birds’. This linkage represents the shared sacred status that both birds and twins have in relation to God: both are gaat kwoth (Children of God). Whilst birds are Children of God because they fly in the sky and are thought to belong to heaven rather than earth, twins are Children of God because of their unusual conception. Being Children of God, both twins and birds are identified with ‘the above’ (air, clouds): ‘Birds are children of God on account of their being in the air, and twins belong to the air on account of their being children of God by the manner of their conception and birth’ (Evans-Pritchard, [1956] 1977: 131). The Nuer resolve the ‘disruption’ caused by twin birth by emphasising the symbolic unity of twinship within the context of certain ritual occasions. For example, no mortuary ceremony is held for a twin because their soul is said to live on in the surviving twin. Later, when they also die, both souls are said to go up into the air together ([1956] 1977: 129). Twins may also be set apart as ‘sacred’ through the attribution of mystical capacities. Associations between twins and mystical powers are well documented. The Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia attributed twins with powers to control the elements. As Frazer noted, ‘they pray to wind and rain, “Calm down, breath of the twins”’ ([1922] 1996: 79). Believing that the wishes of the twins would be obeyed, twins were deemed capable of using their powers to control the weather and to heal or harm others. Among the Baronga of south-east Africa, special rituals were undertaken if the rain did not fall. For example, the mothers of twins (named Tito, ‘The Sky’) were drenched with water in the hope that ‘the sky’ would become saturated, eventually overflowing and bringing rain (Corney, 1977: 13). Twins are therefore both a source of fascination and fear. Cultural beliefs about twins, their parentage and the status of their parents vary.

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This forces us to challenge the assumptions behind our own ideas about twins. Possibly the most compelling argument here though is the fact that the biology of twinning, so central to our own contemporary classifications of twins, is largely irrelevant for some other cultures. In Western societies, the foundation for classifying people as twins lies in a medicalised distinction between different types of twins and between twins and the general population. Identical twins (sometimes referred to as monozygotic twins or MZ twins) are formed when one fertilised egg splits in two. Non-identical twins (dizygotic, DZ or fraternal twins) are formed when two eggs are fertilised separately. Yet, as Diduk points out, in Kedjom society ‘[b]eing labelled a twin rests ultimately on criteria that are assumed to be external to the social order; i.e. being born with god given faculties’ (Diduk, 2001: 29). The category ‘twins’ does not simply include multiple birth children but also includes any other children who are either diagnosed based on one of the several physical markings or who are believed to possess anti-social powers. Similarly, Brain (1969: 216) notes that in Bangwa, the category ‘twins’ includes children who exhibit any physical or later psychological abnormalities (for example, a child delivered by breech, with a caul around its neck or with six fingers). What these examples show, then, is that our contemporary Western medicalised understanding of the diagnosis of twinship is one among many ways of classifying twins. This is not to deny the workings of biology, only to argue that such a medicalised perspective has particular significance for our cultural understandings of twinship, which it might not have elsewhere.

Nature and nurture Alongside this anthropological research, twins have secured a central place in the disciplines of psychology, psychoanalysis and biology. Within this context, twins have traditionally been employed as methodological tools for investigating the role of genetic and non-genetic (‘environmental’) forces in the determination of individual differences. To this end, researchers have drawn upon the classic ‘twin method’. Usually accredited to the work of Sir Francis Galton, this ‘method’ seeks to determine the relative effects of heredity and environment by comparing monozygotic (MZ or identical) and dizygotic (DZ, fraternal or non-identical) twins. Put simply, the twin method assumes that whilst the heredity (genetic make-up) of the two types of twins differs (MZ twins share the same genes whereas DZ twins do not), the influence of the environment is the same in both sets of twins. Since MZ twins

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are genetically similar, any difference is presumed to be non-genetic (Mittler, 1971: 45). Although the twin method has been heavily criticised for assuming that twins share ‘equal environments’ (for instance, see Ainslie et al., 1987; Zazzo, 1978), this academic research has left a long legacy of findings. Thus, within biology twins have been used to test for genetic traits in disease. Within the field of psychology, they have traditionally been utilised to test for genetic components in intelligence, mental disorders and criminal behaviour, as well as to investigate more generally how far particular temperamental aspects of personality are inherited or caused by environmental factors (Kozlak, 1978; Newman, 1942). As Stewart concludes, psychological research tends to focus on pinpointing genetic variations rather than exploring social influences (Stewart, 2003: 62). Psychoanalysis and social psychological research has traditionally adopted a slightly different approach, examining the environmental factors which impact upon the development of the personality and behaviour of twins, such as the twin relationship, the twin situation and parent-child interactions. This research highlights a range of relevant issues which should be taken into account when analysing twinship from a sociological perspective. For instance, research has examined how twins are affected by the social environments in which they grow up. Parents have been identified as playing a key role in this respect. Twins may have to share the attention of their parents (Pulkkinen et al., 2003), be encouraged to act the same (Koch, 1966) or be referred to as a pair (Kozlak, 1978). All these things make the social situation of being a twin ‘unique’ and may influence twins’ behaviour. For example, Koch suggested that identical twins may develop close relationships with each other because they are expected to be close and may be given more areas of common experience. Kozlak (1978: 115) noted that since twins are ‘dressed alike and possess physical similarities, [they] learn to behave as twins and identify with each other’. Similarly, Burlingham (1952) drew attention to how dressing twins the same could potentially impact upon their sense of being an individual. As this implies, much research has focused on the problems that twins face in formulating a sense of their own identities. The process of ‘individuation’, whereby twins separate from both their mother figure and their fellow twin, is key here. Leonard (1961) points out that incomplete differentiation can result in a range of problems, such as language difficulties, retarded maturation and confusion of identity. Importantly, she takes account of how cultural ideas about twins (in the USA) can frame the twin-relationship. However,

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like much of the research already outlined, we get some sense of how ‘environmental factors’ affect twins, but we get less sense of how twins themselves manage and negotiate the situation of being twins. More contemporary accounts of twinship (offered, for instance, within behavioural genetics, developmental psychology and, more recently, sociology) do take much more account of both the active contribution that children make in shaping their social environments and the competencies and skills that they have. For instance, many psychologists are now critical of traditional notions of ‘development’ which have been so central to previous theorising (Prout, 2005: 1). A special edition of the Twin Research and Human Genetics journal published in February 2006 reflected this new approach. Centred around the theme of child twins’ social worlds and bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines (psychology, sociology, anthropology and behavioural genetics), it explored, amongst other things, how MZ and DZ twins’ friendship patterns might reinforce their ‘twin’ status to varying degrees, how twins negotiate their identities through moulding the outer appearance of their bodies, and how twins negotiate the process of being a twin through their interactions with each other.

A social analysis of twinship Therefore, there are increasing attempts both to consider twinship as a social phenomenon and to acknowledge the role that child twins play in shaping their own lives and identities. As stated at the very start of this chapter, the main sociological contribution which expresses, to varying degrees, these two things is Elizabeth Stewart’s (2003) formulation of a more sociological approach to exploring twinship. Her main argument is that twinship is inescapably but not wholly social in character. As well as exploring the social consequences that twinship has for families and twins themselves, she explores and assesses the sociological theoretical contributions of socialisation theories, interpretive sociology and the sociology of childhood. As part of this analysis, and reflecting the contributions of the sociology of childhood, she calls for a ‘more active perspective on twinship’ which acknowledges the work that twins themselves do in shaping and resisting their identities as twins: The social analysis of twinship must address both the (culturally variable) discursive constitution of ‘twinship’ (what twins ‘are’ and what norms they are expected to conform to) and how twins variably and

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creatively negotiate the pressures of unitary identity whether in terms of compliance, contestation or denial (Stewart, 2003: 155, 156). Certainly this is what Twins in Society does. However, unlike Stewart’s account, which is in the main theoretical in its orientation (only one chapter makes use of her own research), this book is mainly based upon interview data provided by 21 twins (aged 8–36) and 15 parents of twins (see Appendix A for an overview of the methodology). This empirical element helps to show the ‘real-life’ applicability of some of these theoretical ideas. Certainly we will hear what the twins themselves have to say about what it is like to be a twin.

Key themes of this book Four interrelated themes are woven throughout this book: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The life course. The social construction of childhood and twinship. The nature of social identity. Structure and agency in the lives of twins.

The life course This book offers a life course perspective on twinship; it examines how twinship is framed by our cultural understandings of particular life course categories (such as ‘childhood’ ‘adulthood’ and the process of ‘growing up’ which links them together) and explores how twins experience being twins at different points in the life course. Stewart’s (2003) empirical study of social attitudes towards twins highlights both our obsession with conceptualising twins as ‘identical’ and also as children (Chapter 2 will also explore this in more detail). She also notes our modern obsessions with individuality, yet she does not show how these ideas all relate to each other, framed as they are within our cultural understanding of what constitutes ‘childhood’, ‘adulthood’ and ‘growing up’. This book offers some insight into these linkages. Part I of this book explores how ideas about the ‘life course’ and ‘growing up’ are woven into children’s social worlds (through cultural discourses, expert advice offered in parenting guides and parents’ views on how to ‘raise’ their twins). Part II explores the significance that twinship has for twins at different points within the life course by comparing and contrasting the accounts of young child twins, teenage (or ‘older’ child twins) and adult twins.

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Two main findings emerge from this analysis. Firstly, parents, experts and twins tend, on the whole, to utilise an ‘ages and stages’ model of child growth when speaking about the process of ‘growing up’: children go through certain ‘stages’ at certain ‘ages’ as they ‘grow up’. This ‘developmental model’ is a dominant discourse which helps us to understand what childhood is (and is not) and how children should ‘grow up’. Secondly, the twins’ accounts showed that, whilst these normative expectations carry weight in shaping some aspects of twins’ lived experiences, they do not simply move from being ‘twins’ to not being ‘twins’ as they get older. Rather, they take up and exit these identities within different social contexts both as children and as adults. Twins therefore move in and out of twinship at different points within the life course. Given the latter, the term ‘life course’ is chosen in preference to the term ‘life cycle’. Whilst the former conceptualises this trajectory as a fluid biological and social process (Hockey and James, 2003) the latter perspective, reflected through anthropological studies of rites of passage (for example, Van Gennep, [1908] 1960) and developmental understandings of child growth (for example, Piaget, 1970), suggests that we move (in a linear manner) from one ‘status’ or ‘stage’ to the next. The notion of ‘life course’ thus ‘admits more variation in patterns of experience’ (Finch, 1987: 162) and for this reason captures a sense in which individuals may move back and forth, in and out of different social identities as they move through life. The social construction of childhood and twinship This book considers both childhood and twinship to be social constructions. From this perspective, it is the social and cultural meanings that characterise different societies at particular times which provide the lenses through which we come to know and understand what childhood is and what twinship is. The ways in which we understand the world are historically and culturally specific. Social constructionist perspectives therefore take a critical stance towards our assumed knowledge about the world, challenging us to question our preconceptions. Rather than accepting knowledge as a simple and unproblematic reflection of what is objectively happening in the social world, they argue that such ‘facts’ have to be established. Thus, people construct and fabricate knowledge systems through their interactions with each other in social life (Burr, 2003). In relation to twins, we can say that the meanings we attribute to twinship are, as this chapter has shown, culturally variable. One aspect of this variability is, as we have already seen, the classification systems we use to define and label people as twins. Similarly, research

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conducted within the New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC) has drawn attention to the ways in which childhood varies both across cultures and across time. In 1962, the French historian Philippe Ariès asserted that ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’ (1962: 125). According to him, the concept of childhood emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Although his work has been criticised (see, for example, Wilson, 1980), it has prompted theorists to consider the ways in which discourses of childhood may be socially and temporally contextualised. In line with this, the key proponents of the NSSC have argued that childhood should be seen as a social construction: something which is built up through social meanings rather than something which is ‘natural’ and ‘given’. Yet this does not mean that we have to construct biology out of existence. Prout and James thus note that ‘[t]he immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture’ (1997: 7). Once we stop taking our ideas about childhood for granted, we can see how they are often formed in opposition to adulthood: children are what adults are not and vice versa. Chapter 2 turns to examine the ‘Western’ conceptualisations of twinship, childhood and adulthood which frame how we think about child twins, how we treat twins and how twins think about themselves. Chapter 3 explores how far parents of twins take up and integrate these normative expectations into their own parenting. Importantly, both chapters examine how ideas about twins, children, adults and growing up relate to each other. They show that, when viewed from a life course perspective, we can see that twinship represents an intensified version of our cultural ideas about ‘the child’. Although children are commonly thought to be dependent and to develop their individuality as they grow up, this mixture of characteristics is more concentrated for twins; twins are said to be dependent on their parents and their twin sibling and are stereotypically constructed as lacking in individuality (they look the same, think the same things and so on). Yet, child twins, like all children, are expected to ‘grow up’. This presents child twins with a series of dilemmas: while they are expected to be the same, they are expected to become individuals; while they are expected to be close and spend time together, they are expected to become independent and autonomous. In Part II of this book, we explore how twins actively participate in constructing twinship and childhood. We will see how twins use, manage, reject or reconfigure these cultural understandings by drawing on particular resources, namely the body (Chapter 4), physical space

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(Chapter 5) and talk (Chapter 6). Thus, this book gives an insight into the various ways in which sets of ideas about twins get built up and reproduced: alongside a consideration of how twinship and childhood are constructed at structural and discursive levels, the book also considers how these are negotiated through everyday interaction. The book concludes by arguing that twinship loses some of its salience as twins grow older and that this reinforces the idea that twinship is a condensed symbol of childhood itself. The nature of social identity Identification, knowing who we are and who others are, is central to our everyday social lives and therefore, as Jenkins (2004: 7) points out, is of fundamental importance to sociology. Indeed, identification forms the basis of how we act towards others and how we would like others to act towards us. Today, so it is claimed, it is the subject’s role to piece together a version of identity from the plurality of alternatives on offer. Increasingly freed from the social confines of industrial society, the individual reflexively constructs his or her own biography in the face of uncertainty and doubt (Giddens, 1991). Certainly, the break away from traditional modes of identification (such as class, kinship, gender and ‘race’) and the rise of individualism in Western society have been well documented (Giddens, 1991; MacFarlane, 1978). However, whilst we may not identify ourselves in these ‘traditional’ terms, these aspects of identity can certainly impact upon how we are treated and how we behave. At the same time, it is also true to say that we are increasingly encouraged to work on our identities, for example, to gym and slim, to see them as malleable and fluid rather than fixed. Identity is, I argue, a social process, worked out between individuals against the social background of the various classificatory systems on offer. As Lawler (2008: 8) argues, identity is ‘socially produced, socially embedded and worked out in the course of people’s everyday social lives’. Jenkins helps us to envisage how this process takes shape. For Jenkins (2000: 8), all identities are the result of an ongoing synthesis of (internal) self-definition and (external) definitions of oneself offered by others. We can never separate internal and external definitions because they are mutually constitutive (Jenkins, 1996: 27). Whilst we define ourselves in particular ways, others also define us. These definitions may (or may not) then reflexively become incorporated into self-identity. Thus, it is only through the process of social interaction that identity emerges. ‘[I]t is not enough to assert an identity. That identity must also be

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validated (or not) by those with whom we have dealings’ (2004: 19). For Jenkins, then, all identities are social identities. Given this, can we talk of an interior sense of identity, often referred to as the ‘self’? Jenkins argues that because identity is constructed across the internal-external dialectic, any definition of the self which describes it as either predominantly internally or predominantly externally determined is flawed. As he puts it, ‘the entire point of the model of the internal-external dialectic of identification underpinning my understanding of identification is to avoid privileging either side of that relationship’ ( Jenkins, 2004: 30). Our sense of self, then, is built up through the entangled relationship between external perceptions, collective identifications, stereotypes, individual internal feelings and embodied experiences. Like other identities, twinship is an identity that has to be established through social interaction and across the internal-external dialectic of identification. Identifying ourselves and others always involves meaning. We apply meanings, modify meanings and resist meanings during the course of our social lives. Thus, as we will see, whilst some twins may be externally defined as ‘twins’, this may be an identity they wish to distance themselves from at certain times. Just how successful they might be in achieving this distance depends on a range of issues, including the extent to which they can convince others that they fall outside of this category. This book therefore begins by exploring the ‘external’ aspects of the identification process (discourses of twinship and parent-child relations) before turning to examine the connection of these aspects with the individual perceptions and presentations of self of twins. It draws attention to the links between broader family narratives and twins’ own constructions of self, alongside how twins actively try to reproduce, resist and transform external perceptions of ‘twins’. Any discussion of twin identity also gives us some insight into twins’ sibling relationships with each other. ‘At the heart of ties between siblings – of whatever quality – lie issues of identity and relationality’ (Edwards, 2008: 51). Research on siblingship has typically fallen within the discipline of psychology and examined the behavioural and educational consequences of living in particular sibling configurations (variously structured in terms of number of siblings, birth order, gender balance and age spacing). Much of this research has relied on accounts provided by parents and teachers, and has also focused on how adults shape children’s experiences of siblingship (see Edwards et al., 2005: 3–5). However, there is now a growing body

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of sociological research on siblingship which focuses on children’s perspectives; this research explores children’s own accounts of their experiences and examines the work that children do in building and shaping their sibling relationships (see Edwards, 2008; Edwards et al., 2006; Edwards et al., 2005; Punch, 2001, 2004, 2008b; Song, 2008). By exploring how twins work out their own identities alongside and using each other, Part II of this book adds to this research base; it reveals the ambivalent nature of twins’ relationships with each other and the power dynamics that underpin and shape their experiences. Structure and agency in the lives of twins Twins live out their lives in various enabling and constraining social contexts. Any exploration of identity that embraces both the individual and the collective, the personal and the social, calls forth a conceptualisation of society that captures the interplay between structure and agency and the subjective and objective aspects of social life. Giddens and Bourdieu have both attempted this. Giddens’ synthesis is expressed through his notion of the ‘duality of structure’: According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise. Structure is not ‘external’ to individuals: as memory traces and as instantiated in social practices, it is in a certain sense more ‘internal’ than exterior to their activities in a Durkheimian sense. Structure is not to be equated with constraints but is always both enabling and constraining (Giddens, 1984: 25). Structure is therefore made up of sets of rules and resources that only exist insofar as they are acted out in the actions of people in their everyday lives. Structure both pre-dates and emerges from action, and ‘provide[s] the fundamental means for interaction’ (Mouzelis, 1989: 615) whilst at the same time being the outcome of it. In this sense, structure and agency are two sides of the same coin. Neither can exist without the other. Thus, in contrast to traditional theorising, structure is both enabling and constraining; allowing agents to act, as well as setting the parameters for such action. Notwithstanding his attempts to synthesise structure and agency, Giddens’ ‘structuration theory’ has been criticised for reifying ‘society’ as an external entity separate from the members that constitute it (Cohen, 1994). Craib (1998) also notes that, in attempting to bring together such a broad body of academic works, Giddens oversimplifies elements of modern social theory and provides

Introduction: Situating Twins in Society 15

an inadequate account of human agency that does not pay enough attention to the unconscious. Bourdieu addresses some of these issues. Like Giddens, his theory of social reproduction argues that individual action accounts for the transformation and endurance of social structures. Through his notion of ‘habitus’ he attempts to ground these structures in human embodiment. According to him, we each embody a set of ‘durable, transposable dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53) (obtained through experience and teaching) which we bring to social situations and use to produce social practices: ‘the habitus imbues people with a tacit sense of how to become competent social agents, which is realized in practices that are constitutive of social life’ (Tucker, 1998: 71). We are therefore rarely conscious of it. Instead, as we incorporate the possibilities and limitations of social action, the habitus provides us with a ‘feel for the game’ of social life that becomes almost second nature (Wolfreys, 2000). Some critics argue that in theorising the coterminous relationship between individual and society, Bourdieu implies that the individual is at the mercy of their ‘habitus’ and thus provides an overly deterministic account of social life. However, Bourdieu is quick to defend himself: Habitus is not the fate that some people read into it. Being the product of history, it is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that reinforces or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal! (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 133, original italics) Both Giddens and Bourdieu contribute useful conceptual tools for understanding the relationship between the individual and society. Even though Bourdieu’s notion of habitus may achieve this synthesis slightly more successfully, both remind us of the importance of human action in constructing, reproducing and transforming social structures. The individual cannot be detached from society, nor society from the individual. Hence, the emphasis they place on the simultaneity of structure and agency supports a conceptualisation of identity as personal and social, individual and collective, and therefore constitutes another dominant theme within this book. Alongside a firm appreciation of the social expectations and parental decisions that serve to shape their experiences, we need to take account of children and young people as social actors who have a part to play in shaping their own and each other’s identities. This book is therefore divided into two parts: ‘structuring contexts’ and ‘agency contexts’.

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Importantly, this is merely a device to ensure clarity and one way by which to explore this dynamic interplay between structure and agency and the internal-external dialectic in a systematic way. In many ways it is rather difficult to capture a sense of the process of building and negotiating social identities. Even though, in real life, agency is enacted within structural contexts at the same time as structural contexts are themselves erected through social action, and even though our own internal sense of identity exists simultaneously with other people’s views of us, language demands that we talk sequentially. As Jenkins (2004: 25) notes, ‘sequence is one of the things that makes language make sense’. Thus, for purposes of clarity, we must deal with particular parts of this process whilst showing the links with others. Chapter 2 therefore examines how discourses of twinship and ‘growing up’ structure our social understandings of twinship. Chapter 3 then turns to explore one particular social context, parent-child relations, within which ‘twin’ identity is negotiated. Initially framed within Bordieu’s theory of social reproduction, this chapter examines how the ideas and expectations held by parents and the decisions they make about how to dress their twins, how to allocate bedroom space within the home and whether or not to place their twins together at school can help to both encourage particular embodied ways of being and set the stage for twins’ identity work. Part II of this book then turns to explore children’s agency. Chapter 4 begins this analysis by examining the very basis of agency: the body. As embodied beings we both live in and as our bodies (Lyon and Barbalet, 1994: 54). Any account of social action must therefore take the physicality of the body seriously. This is especially the case when examining the construction of twin identity: an identity tied to the appearance of the physical body. Chapter 5 investigates children’s use of physical space at home and at school. Here space is conceptualised as a resource for both expressing and constructing identity. As embodied beings, we act in time and space. Particular attention is given to the ways in which physical space is utilised to position the self in relation to the three defining features of ‘twin identity’ (sameness, togetherness and closeness). Interestingly, this section shows that space may be the most useful resource for escaping twinship, especially where the physicality of the body limits transformative capacity. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the modes of talk employed by child and adult twins. This chapter draws attention to both the intentional and unconscious nature of social action. This analysis shows that whilst twins may deliberately use talk to distance themselves from their plural status, other aspects of their talk may also serve to reaffirm this.

Part I Structuring Contexts

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2 Discourses

The first part of this book examines how twins’ lives and identities are structured for them in some ways. Here we begin by exploring one dimension of this structuring context: the dominant discourses of twinship, childhood and adulthood which characterise ‘Western Society’, by which I mean North American/northern European societies, especially Anglophone cultures such as the UK, the USA and Australia.1 These ideas provide an important structuring context within which twins and their families (in this UK study and potentially other Anglo-American cultures too) bring meaning to twinship as it is experienced across the life course.

Discourses, knowledge and power When a set of meanings, representations, stories and images come together to produce an account of how things are, we refer to this collection of shared ideas as a discourse (Burr, 2003: 64). ‘The term discourse is taken to mean a whole set of interconnected ideas that work together in a self-contained way, ideas that are held together by a particular ideology or view of the world’ (Stainton Rogers, 2003: 21). This system of ideas provides us with a particular understanding of the social world. Discourses therefore constitute the knowledge systems that bring meaning to our everyday lives. They ‘shape how we think about things, how we talk about them, and what we see as our choices’ (Gilbert et al., 1999: 754). They feed into the ways in which we think, feel and act, they provide a framework for interpreting social meanings and, crucially, they play a central role in helping us to construct ourselves and identify others as certain types of people. 19

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Importantly, discourses are more than just words. The statements that constitute them emerge from and through social action. Discourses are therefore both a product of, and a structuring context for, social action (Frank, 1991). Power is a central component of this process because discourses compete to produce legitimate knowledge and a sense of ‘truth’; a story about how things should be (Foucault, 1980). Knowledge systems are therefore invested with, and carry forth, varying degrees of authority (to make their version of events count). Dominant discourses are dominant in the sense that they have largely won the contest for legitimacy and also in the sense that they are widespread. Quite often these dominant discourses are condensed and summarised in stereotypes. Given this, stereotypes are especially useful resources in helping us to identify others and ourselves as certain sorts of people. By simplifying similarities within groups and differences between groups, they help us to draw out the lines of difference between each other and also to foster a sense of belonging (Rapport, 1995: 279). Importantly, because they help us to bring meaning to our everyday roles and routines, they also provide a ‘script’ for performing identity. As Cohen and Taylor (1976: 50–51) explain, scripts ‘tell us how we should be acting and feeling at any particular moment, provide us with details of others whom we encounter in the situation and forecast the next move in the game, the next development in the play’. Others may draw on these scripts to forecast how we will act and what we will say. Furthermore, as the next chapter shows, they may use them to help classify, identify or present us as particular types of people. Similarly, we may use these ‘scripts’ to classify others and, as Part II of this book shows, employ them (to varying degrees) when producing our own performances of identity. It is therefore important that we sketch out these different discourses.

Discourses of childhood We begin by examining the dominant discourses of childhood and adulthood, and how they have changed over time, from the age of modernity to the current time of ‘late-modernity’ or ‘post-modernity’. Although it is a simplification, modern society or the modern ‘age’ is identified with the industrial capitalist era and the Enlightenment’s intellectual pursuit of reason and progress. One defining ‘mark’ of industrial society’s modern understandings of childhood relates to the separate and particular nature ascribed to children (Archard, 2004: 37). In many Western cultures, such as those in the UK and the USA, the child and adult have been understood through their mutual opposition ( Jenks, 2005: 3). Whilst the child

Discourses 21

lacks personhood, the adult has come to symbolise the acquisition of it. Although the concept of personhood incorporates ‘some idea of completeness and wholeness, in the sense of achieving full membership of society’ (Hockey and James, 1993: 48), what this actually entails varies over time and across cultures (see Mauss, [1938] 1985). Our own modern notions of personhood have to be set against the cultural backdrop of the rise of Western individualism. With roots in the entrepreneurial activities of the thirteenth century and the growth of Calvinistic Protestantism, individualism emerged out of a market economy that encouraged contractual relations between workers over traditional associations based on kin and class (MacFarlane, 1978). The autonomous, independent and unique individual has thus become a defining component of socially respectable personhood (La Fontaine, 1985). As Turner notes, ‘to be an individual is to be a particular individual’ (Turner, 1986: 6). Difference, then, is a central component of ‘felt’ individuality (Cohen and Taylor, 1976: 20). From a Western perspective, this distinctiveness, associated with the development of self, is discretely embodied within the singular and separate body. In this sense, the notion of the ‘bounded individual’ (Geertz, 1974: 31) captures the essence of Westernised personhood; to be a person is ‘to be distinguished from the other, to be ordered and discrete, secure within the well-defined boundaries of the body’ (Shildrick, 2000: 79). In many ways, these ideas reflect our obsession with viewing identity as an ‘inner core’ which is ‘authentic’ and which lies outside of social relationships with other people. Lawler (2008: 6, 7) draws on the work of Norbert Elias to explain how, in fact, this notion of identity as being somehow self-contained emerged over time as part of the ‘civilising process’. This process, from about the time of the Renaissance, emphasised the value of humans demonstrating selfcontrol. Humans had to manage their ‘internal’ states by subscribing to the correct socially approved forms of behaviour or manners. This then gave rise to the idea that true identity was somehow contained or locked within the individual. The bureaucratic process of individuation has affirmed the singularity of individual persons. The liberal state treats each human being as one entity, with particular rights and responsibilities, and provides the basis for establishing equality between persons (Nasman, 1994; Turner, 1986). This singular and separate person is able to think and act both rationally and independently of others. An important aspect of this independence relates to the capacity to work and secure economic self-reliance (Hockey and James, 1993). During the process of Western industrialisation, children

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were removed from the workplace and relocated to the domestic settings of the home and school (Hendrick, 1997). Thus, we have come to associate the ability to work, exercise choice and self-determination, and to have legal rights and responsibilities (for instance, eligibility to vote) with the acquisition of full personhood and, as such, with the achievement of adulthood.2 In direct contrast to the ideal of (adult) independence, the child of modernity is a symbol of innocence, vulnerability and dependency (Hockey and James, 1993). The roots of this image of the innocent child can be traced back to the eighteenth century, where Rousseau, in Emile, pronounced: ‘God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil’ (cited in James et al., 1998: 13). This angelic child is uncorrupted by the adult world and should be kept in this natural state for as long as possible. These ideas found expression in the Romantic images of Blake and Wordsworth and continue to hold currency in our contemporary understandings of the child (Hendrick, 1997). Feeding into ideas of childhood innocence are discourses of child incompetence. Presumed to be socially incompetent, children have commonly been perceived to require the protection and wisdom of adult caretakers. For example, children have had their welfare rights (such as rights to education, healthcare and freedom from violence and cruelty) increasingly affirmed since the late nineteenth century (Hockey and James, 1993) and these, as Archard (2004) notes, emphasise that adults (parents and the state) are responsible for caring for the young. It is only after children have legally become adults that they have the unconditional right to marry, the right to vote, the right to welfare benefits and the right to donate blood or organs for transplantation. This aspect of our modern conceptualisation of ‘the child’ owes much to traditional theories of developmental psychology. During the second part of the nineteenth century, childhood became the subject of serious psychological interest and investigation. Influenced by postEnlightenment ideals of growth and progress and Darwinian notions of evolution and development, developmental psychology conceptualised the transition from childhood to adulthood in terms of the child’s progression through a series of fixed stages. One of the most influential figures to contribute to this model of the ‘naturally developing child’ ( James et al., 1998) was Jean Piaget, who saw the child move through four stages of mental growth: sensory-motor intelligence; preconceptual thought; intuitive thought; and formal operations. These stages were chronologically ordered and increased in complexity as the child aged ( Jenks, 2005).3 Within this model, the child and adult are diametrically

Discourses 23

opposed: the child lacks competence, whereas the adult has achieved it. Indeed, rational thought becomes the marker of full adult status and as such is presented as a desirable goal. Therefore: What [this model] provides analytically and culturally, are some grounds to establish differences between adults and children. The control provided by adult competence justifies the supremacy of adulthood and further ensures that childhood must, of necessity, be viewed as an inadequate precursor to the real state of human being, namely being ‘grown-up’ ( James et al., 1998: 18). Adulthood is therefore positioned as an end point of development; whilst children are in a state of ‘becoming’, adults have arrived at the ‘finished’ state of ‘being’ (Archard, 2004: 41). These notions of progress and development were imported directly into traditional sociological socialisation theories of the 1950s and provided the basis for the model of the ‘socially developing child’ ( James et al., 1998: 23). Parsons, one of the key contributors to sociological socialisation theories, was concerned with the problem of social order and consequently formulated a ‘top-down’ theory that explained how children became integrated into ‘society’.4 The successful assimilation of new members primarily took place within the family, where children learned to acquire the norms and values fostered by adults. Only in learning these new ways could children become fully functional (adult) members of society. Thus, as was the case with Piaget’s model, children passively await their eventual arrival into the adult world, but this time they become competent social actors. Parsons’ model is therefore also based upon a developmental schema that positions children as incompetent becomings rather than competent beings and, like traditional perspectives within developmental psychology, implies that development and growth are positive and inevitable features of the child’s biological maturation. Importantly, ‘adolescence’ (and I use this term deliberately because, as we will see later on, this is the terminology used in many of the parenting guides that parents of twins have access to) has often been identified as the ‘stage’ where most of this ‘growing up’ is done. Hence, even now, we tend to think of ‘adolescence’ as being mainly a biological and psychological stage of development: fuelled by the onset of puberty, it is an ambiguous time full of hormones, contradiction, uncertainty and ‘rebellion’. Indeed, ever since the ‘discovery’ of adolescence by US psychologist G. Stanley Hall, representations of this ‘transitional’ phase

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of life have hinged on the ‘storm and stress’ model, where adolescence is seen as a time of social and psychological turmoil halfway between childhood and adulthood (Griffin, 2001). Children moving through this stage, as human becomings, are commonly understood to develop independence and a unique individuality. For instance, in 1950, Erikson pronounced the search for identity as the fifth ‘age of man’: The growing and developing youths, faced with this physiological revolution within them, are now primarily concerned with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are (Erikson, 1950: 253). More recently, Kroger has stated: Although the foundations of ‘I’ are formed in infancy through the interactions of care-takers and child, adolescence does seem to be a time, at least in contemporary, technologically advanced western cultures, when one is confronted with the task of self-definition (1996: 1). During this time, children individuate from their parents, leaving behind their child dependency in order to develop a stronger sense of who they are. This separation, during the final steps towards adulthood, is portrayed as a positive aspect of development (Brannen, 1996). Only in adulthood is this individuality said to reach full fruition (Qvortrup, 1994: 10). Alongside this cultural ideal of individuality are placed the related values of autonomy and independence. Thus, writing about North American society, Davis and Davis (2005) note that children are expected to become emotionally self sufficient and self-directed so that they can discover who they are, that is, so that they can establish a sense of their own uniqueness. Becoming an adult means becoming an autonomous thinker and independent actor. Thus, children are expected to leave the parental home to begin their own lives and create their own homes (Allan and Crow, 2001).5 Those adults who fail in this endeavour risk being stigmatised. As Murphy (cited in Hockey and James, 1993: 72) argues, ‘overdependency and non-reciprocity are considered childish traits, and adults who have them – even if it’s not their fault – suffer a reduction in status’. In sum, our modern conception of childhood is defined in relation to adulthood and thus becomes associated with a ‘lack’ of adulthood.

Discourses 25

Child Dependent Incompetent Irresponsible Innocent Foundations of self

Adolescent Development Progression Positive movement

Adult Independent Competent Responsible (citizen) Knowing Unique self

Incomplete Unfinished Becoming Figure 2.1

Complete Finished Being

From ‘becoming’ to ‘being’

Adolescence, while being commonly understood to be a transitory phase, is also still discursively structured in terms of ‘childhood’ because, here too, young people are defined through their lack of adulthood and status as human becomings. Figure 2.1 denotes our cultural understandings of how children grow up.

Late modernity: change and continuity So, has anything changed? As the introduction began to explain, commentators both within and outside of sociology are turning their attention to explaining the social, economic and political changes that have come to underpin today’s Western societies. Some argue that we are living in a post-modern society, whilst others argue that we are living in a changed state of modernity (hence the terms ‘late-modernity’ or ‘high-modernity’). What these accounts share is a view that today’s social life carries with it less certainties and more risks. With the decline of manufacturing comes a shift away from production towards a society based on consumption and new information technologies. Old points of collective attachment (such as social class, work, community and family) become less stable and we are instead left to develop our own individualised identities (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991). Globalisation also makes locally-based cultural differences less geographically fixed. In his book The Future of Childhood, Alan Prout (2005) agues that ideas about childhood are beginning to change because the boundary between childhood and adulthood is becoming blurred. He cites three main reasons for this. Firstly, there is now growing acceptance that not all children will experience the same childhood. Images of childhood, transported (and exported) around the world, show a plurality of different types of childhood: from childhoods characterised by poverty, distress and famine to childhoods characterised by active, competent and participatory

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action. Patterns of migration may also mean that child migrants and refugees have different experiences to other children living in their host communities. These events have served to break up the unitary character of childhood, making it less self-contained (and easily compartmentalised). Secondly, deindustrialisation and the growth of service sector economies have made traditional modes of identification less clear-cut. As Lee (2001) notes, the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist way of life has destabilised our normative definition of the ‘standard adult’ (an adult whose job, social relationships and place of residence was stable and unchanging).6 Today we have to be flexible workers, willing to move house, re-skill and develop new social relationships as the job market demands. This makes the notion of ‘adulthood’ as a fixed ‘end’ of development more difficult to ground in reality. Thirdly, changes in family structure and family relationships have helped to question ideas about children’s passive social status. With women going out to work, the decline of the traditional male breadwinner family, the rise in divorce and the decline of the nuclear family as the dominant way of living family life, children may experience different types of family life during their childhoods and, as such, they may have to establish different types of relationships with different family members. This involves processes of negotiation, something which draws attention to children’s agency and social competence (Prout, 2005). Further dimensions of uncertainty were brought into public view after the murder of Jamie Bulger in 1993.7 Even though child killings had happened prior to this event (in the UK, the most infamous case being the double-child murderer Mary Bell), the Bulger murder marked a watershed in our thinking about children. Images of the ‘evil child’ ( James et al., 1998: 10), with their roots in the Puritan discourse of original sin, were utilised in relation to the killers of Jamie Bulger (see James and Jenks, 1996: 323). What was once taken for granted was now being questioned, raising feelings of public uncertainty. At this time, such an act of brutality was literally ‘unthinkable’, because the stereotype of innocence so consumed our public imaginings of childhood ( James and Jenks, 1996: 315). Fears that children are growing up too quickly, that they have too much access to ‘adult knowledge’ and are losing their distinctive cultures (through toys and clothing for instance) populate both public and academic debates about childhood (see Postman, 1994). A further dimension of uncertainty is created as the boundaries surrounding and identifying ‘youth’ as a particular period of the life course change, reaching further down into childhood (as the age of the onset of puberty

Discourses 27

lowers) and further up into adulthood (as children remain in education for longer and thus also remain economically and socially dependent on adults) (James and James, 2008: 150). Important changes have also happened in relation to children’s rights. From a legal perspective, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by the UK (in 1991) and 190 other countries can, in some ways, be seen as an attempt to uphold a commitment to recognising children as persons in their own right. Article 12 is often seen to be particularly important because of its potential to develop our awareness that children, like the rest of us, have views and opinions that should be taken into account in matters that affect their lives. According to this article: State parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views, the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child (United Nations General Assembly, 1989). Although this Article appears to uphold children’s rights to participate in society, it has been heavily criticised. As Archard (2004) notes, not only is the notion of age conflated with ‘maturity’, but it is adults who judge how much ‘weight’ the child’s views should be given. Ultimately, it is also someone other than the child who makes the decisions on which children are being asked their views. Notwithstanding these changes, conventional representations of childhood as a time of dependency and development still dominate our everyday lives. As Jenks (2005: 122) notes, ‘children themselves remain enmeshed in the forced commonality of an ideological discourse of childhood’, which is principally defined through lack of responsibility, dependency, fun and protection. Children are still represented as apprentices and childhood is still thought of as a time of preparation for the future (Lee, 2001: 8). The cultural value that we attribute to getting older and ‘growing up’ is all too evident. The iconography of children’s birthday cards pronounces and celebrates the increased age of the child. If someone is being ‘immature’ we tell them to ‘grow up!’. The very notion of ‘growing up’ metaphorically reflects the positive value that we attribute to being a ‘grown up’; the movement from childhood to adulthood is represented as a progressive development. The collection of knowledges which produce ‘truths’ about childhood (sometimes referred to as the ‘psy complex’ (see Donzelot, 1980),

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encompassing medicine, psychology, psychiatry and pedagogy) still remains important in shaping how we think about and treat children. In particular, the ‘developmental’ ideas of Parsons and Piaget have come to form part of a ‘dominant framework’ for understanding children and how they ‘grow up’ (Prout and James, 1997). Experts on children and childhood are more likely to use this framework of ideas in order to help them justify their views, actions and decisions (Lee, 2001: 45). Thus, parents and educators are ‘contracted to bring up our children in such a manner that their state of pristine innocence remains unspoilt by the violence and ugliness that surrounds them’ ( James et al., 1998: 14). The contemporary drive in the UK to test and assess children through SATs (Standard Assessment Tests) reflects traditional developmental understandings of children’s (normative) growth ( James and James, 2004: 125). In line with notions of childhood as a time of apprenticeship and training, the child is still primarily valued for what they will become in the future. Thus, although citizenship education is taught in UK schools, the main aim, as Weller (2007: 31) points out, is to create future responsible citizens. Citizenship, containing a package of rights and responsibilities, implies, amongst other things, autonomy (Faulks, 2000). As a result of this, children and young people have a problematic relationship with it. Commonly assumed to be incompetent and vulnerable, children and young teenagers are thought incapable of making decisions that are in their ‘best interests’ or of fully participating in social life (Weller, 2007: 29). However, this has not stopped children and young people displaying their roles as citizens, thereby revealing the inadequacy of common-sense understandings of children as ‘future citizens’ or ‘citizens-in-the-making’. Amongst many examples of children’s display of ‘active citizenship’ are their anti-war protests in the UK in 2003 (Cunningham and Lavalette, 2004), the dissent of six Berkley High School students arguing for lowering the voting age in the USA (Zeiger, 2004) and hundreds of students in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide protesting against Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party (BBC News, 1998). When children refuse to stay in their appropriate ‘places’ (as incompetent, dependent becomings), action may be taken to firm up the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. This in itself suggests that we are concerned to maintain the typically modernist distinction between children and adults. Indeed, Wyness (2000: 8) argues that our unease about the so called ‘crisis’ of childhood (associated with the increasing uncertainty about the definition and distinctiveness of

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childhood) actually reflects some sense in which children are thought to be out of place. This classificatory ambivalence has to be tidied up if children and adults are to remain as separate and distinct. Thus, Lee (2001: 57–69) points out that the British New Labour government’s Child Safety Orders, Parenting Orders and curfews can be seen as practices which help to preserve and firm up this ideological distinction between children and adults by, amongst other things, taking children off the streets and placing them back into the care of their parents, who are encouraged to control them. The growing institutionalisation of childhood and the fear of ‘stranger danger’ may also work to maintain and police the clarity of this ideological distinction. Nasman (1994) notes that children in Europe are spending an increasing amount of time in institutionalised settings (such as childcare, schooling and organised leisure clubs) which position children’s childhoods under the professional control of adults. Within these settings the conduct of children can be policed and regulated by formal rules and regulations. Valentine and McKendrick (1997) have also found that, from research conducted in the north-west of England, children are now less likely to play outside and are more likely to play in and around the home. This, they argue, is linked to parental anxieties about their children’s safety in public spaces. Similarly, in her book Toxic Childhood, Palmer (2006) notes that children’s play activities have become both increasingly solitary and screen-based. This has occurred as a result of technological developments (for example, new forms of media such as handheld consoles and the Wii) as well as the increase in parental fears about the risks that society presents to children. Taken together, institutionalisation and the fear of ‘stranger danger’ have helped to reassert and redefine the appropriate ‘place’ of childhood both in physical terms (for example, children belong at home or at school) and in ideological terms (for example, childhood should be characterised by innocence and dependency, adult protection and control). Such trends therefore reflect our need to guard against the perceived threat to child wellbeing but, more broadly, they also reflect our defending of the social institution of childhood. As Scott et al. (1998: 694) put it, ‘keeping children safe can entail keeping them childlike and dependent’. Yet paradoxically this protectionism also raises more fear and anxiety, namely that we are rearing ‘cotton wool kids’ who are too protected from the realities of life. This in itself shows how we continue to emphasise the becoming of childhood: in line with socialisation theories, the emphasis is placed on how children will turn out as future adults.

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Finally, we should not finish this section without giving some mention to the important place that individuality continues to have in defining our status as human beings and therefore also in defining what children should aspire to. We only have to look to the fears surrounding human cloning to confirm our contemporary cultural valuing of uniqueness. The United Nations ‘Declaration on Human Cloning’ (adopted by the General Assembly in 2005) urges Member States to ‘prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life’ (United Nations General Assembly, 2005). As Prainsack and Spector (2006: 2744) note, fears surrounding human cloning reflect concerns over the threat to individuality made by the production of an individual genetically similar to another. Individuality remains a central concern for families: families are expected to ‘raise’ individuals (Ribbens, 1994). Indeed, Strathern notes that the individuality of persons constitutes the ‘first fact of English kinship’ (1992: 14). Although we think of (singleton) children as genetically individual because they embody a combination of their parents’ genetic makeup, individuality is also a social achievement and a central concern of family life (Strathern, 1992). As we will see below, it is this obsession with individuality that underpins expert opinions on some of the ‘problems’ that twins face and how they are best dealt with.

Defining twinship Because child twins are not only children but twins as well, they are commonly characterised as specific sorts of ‘becomings’. When we investigate discourses of twinship and childhood alongside each other, we reveal how twinship represents an intensified version of the traditional, but still dominant, symbol of ‘the child’. Representations of twinship emerge through a variety of different mediums, including academic works, parenting guides about twins, newspapers, films, chat shows, documentaries and novels. These provide some insight into our cultural understandings and expectations of twins and, more specifically, into our normative constructions of twinship as a social identity. Importantly, parents, child twins, other family members and public strangers may have access to these kinds of resources; therefore, in analysing some of their content, this section outlines one further important aspect to the cultural backdrop against which the parents and twins within this study perform, resist and reconstruct notions of twinship. Although some of the parenting guides were

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published some time ago, they are still available via the Web and multiple birth organisations. Three interrelated characteristics are central to our cultural notions of twinship: sameness, togetherness and closeness. Although the analysis below does not constitute a representative sample of works, the prevalence of these discourses is indicated by their repeated presence across these different cultural mediums. The following sections trace each of these key discourses out. Sameness Sameness lies at the heart of our cultural constructions of twinship. As Levi-Strauss noted: In the whole of Europe, popular ideas pertaining to twins embroider on the theme of their complete identification: they are physically indistinguishable from each other except through recourse to clothing or to cosmetic means (Levi-Strauss, 1995: 228–9). We assume and expect twins to be ‘identical’: to have identical bodies and (often) identical clothes. As part of her social analysis of twinship, Stewart (2003) conducted two different studies of social attitudes towards twins in the UK. The first was a questionnaire for parents of twins, administered to 100 parents who attended conferences and study days organised by TAMBA (the Twins and Multiple Births Association). The second was a street-delivered questionnaire conducted with members of the public in London and Oxford. The overwhelming conclusion from both studies was that we think of twins as being identical: The basic assumption seems to be that twins are (or, some argued should be) identical and that twinship by its very nature involves two individuals who are the same, who look alike, who wear the same clothes. The association of similarity or ‘identicalness’ with the word twins, as well as the images of twins being largely appearance based, was revealed (Stewart, 2003: 129). This obsession with twins looking the same is not confined to the UK. Describing the cultural attitudes towards twins in the USA, Leonard (1961: 301) writes that ‘[t]wins look alike, think alike. They never fight. They have a closer relationship than any other known to mankind’. In line with this stereotype, the Discovery Health Channel searched for

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America’s most identical twins (see Fierro, 2009). In the USA, twin festivals celebrate the plurality of twinship. As Davis and Davis (2004a) found, twin attendees of the Twinsburg festival in Ohio often put on an exaggerated performance of twinship, not only wearing matching clothes but also matching jewellery, hairstyles and nail polish. Similarly, in Australia, a TV show called Twins: Australia’s Most Identical involved 100 sets of identical twins competing to be pronounced the most identical. Interestingly, although not surprisingly, the producer, Deb Byrne, asked the twins to wear identical clothes when appearing on the show, thus accentuating their identical appearance (Kalina, 2003). A second important finding from Stewart’s study was that we also tend to think of twins as being children: ‘images of twins fell within the area of babies or children as our associations with doubleness are child-orientated’ (Stewart, 2003: 129). Thus, the adult twins attending the Twinsburg festival not only invert and resist dominant Western ideologies of personhood, but they also resist the way in which such expectations are mapped onto the life course. Adult twins are not supposed to dress exactly the same. As Davis and Davis (2004a) note, the sight of adult twins dressed alike is far more remarkable than ‘cute’ child twins dressed alike. Examples abound in children’s stories about twins, especially in relation to their physical appearance. For instance, Roger Hargreaves’ Little Miss Twins (1984) are exact replicas of each other. A picture of the two twins dominates the front cover where they mirror each other’s actions perfectly. Turning onto the first page, the association between twins and sameness is confirmed, the opening line declares: ‘You just couldn’t tell them apart!’ Similarly, Lewis Carroll’s (1971) ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ are identically dressed schoolboys who wear name tags (on the collar of their shirts) to make their identities clear. Enid Blyton’s Twins at St Clare’s are ‘so alike that only a few people could tell which was Pat and which was Isabel’ (1941: 1) and similarly, Jacqueline Wilson’s Double Act twins, Ruby and Garnet, immediately inform us: ‘We’re identical. There’s very few people who can tell us apart’ (Wilson, 1995: 1). Going as far back as Shakespeare (Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors), twins have featured in comic scenarios of mistaken identity, a theme that continues to be a common twin motif. The film The Parent Trap (remade in 1999) relies on the ability of twins to ‘swap places’ and take on each other’s identities. In the movie, one actress played both twins, further confirming the sense in which twins may be thought to be two versions of the same person. Poems about twins (written for children) also draw on this stereotype. John Foster’s Who’s Who (1993) begins, ‘He looks like

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me/I look like him’ and similarly the first stanza of David Harmer’s Which One Are You? (1993) begins: Look at me Look at him Just the same Just my twin So powerful are twins’ bodies in signifying sameness and twoness that advertisers often exploit them to communicate information about their own consumer products or offers. For example, a Marks & Spencer advertisement for double store card points ( July 2004) featured identical twin girls. Dressed in identical outfits with identical hairstyles and facial expressions, and standing in mirrored positions holding hands, it is their physical sameness, indeed ‘doubleness’, which we are encouraged to observe. This instantly makes these girls recognisable as twins and it is because of this that we attribute their bodies with a whole range of cultural meanings. These twins are alike in every way; they belong together and quite literally look to each other for company. In short, these twins force us to consider the value of having a twin, someone else, someone like us, two rather than just one. Through their sameness, smiles and symmetry these twins help to signify that double points are better than single points. We are encouraged to envy their companionship (‘I wish I was a twin’) and to attribute the fulfilment of being ‘two’ to acquiring ‘double’ points. Because of their power to represent sameness, twins have also been important resources for demonstrating the differences that consumer products can make. For instance, an advert for ‘Dove’ hair conditioner (November 2003) showed one identical twin using the Dove conditioner.8 After washing, her hair was then compared to her twin sister’s in order to show that the Dove brand produced shiny healthy hair (as compared to dry hair). Although it is not essential to use twins to highlight the difference that using a specific conditioner can make to your hair, twins allow the advertiser to draw upon and communicate a number of unspoken ‘truths’. The stereotypical image of the twin body brings notions of natural sameness immediately into view. Within this context, the differences, which are clearly shown in the advert, seem ‘amazing’ because the conditioner has overpowered and transformed nature! By setting up an ‘experiment’ (where the twins are alike in every way except for the ‘treatment’, Dove conditioner, being administered to only one of them) the advertiser implies that

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the test is ‘scientific’, ‘valid’ and ‘reliable’. Hence, by using twins the advertiser can present difference as ‘fact’ and convey some sense of the ‘true’ extent of difference. Although images of identical twins dominate representations of twins, there are also examples of non-identical twins. When same-sex twins are presented as completely non-identical, they can be a device for generating humour, as in the comedy film Twins. Here Arnold Schwarzenegger is the tall twin and Danny De Vito is the small twin. The idea that twins can look so dissimilar is presented as ridiculous (Stewart, 2003: 35). Images of different-sex twins may emphasise both sameness and difference in order to mark out their gendered identities. For example, in the ‘Rugrats’ tales, ‘Phil’ and ‘Lil’ both appear as almost identical replicas; they have the same clothing but Lil has a pink bow in her hair. Jane Fisher’s Cherry Twins (1983) are also different-sex twins who are drawn exactly the same, apart from the fact that Charlie wears shorts whilst Cheryl wears a skirt. Thus, physical sameness is used to highlight their status as twins at the same time as differences in dress are used to highlight their different gender identities. However, in these examples, the extent of difference is so slight that twinship (sameness) remains the dominant identity. Indeed, even when we are faced with different-sex twins, we may still search out sameness. In her study, Stewart found that ‘[e]ven those parents of boy/girl twins were constantly asked if their twins were identical. One father reports that having told people about his boy/girl twins he was still asked, “Aren’t they a bit identical then?” ’ (Stewart, 2003: 125). It is this obsession with sameness which makes it more difficult to think of different-sex twins as twins at all. We will see evidence of this throughout this book. Descriptions of twins’ personalities seem more ambivalent, switching between absolute sameness and complete opposites. For instance, on the one hand, the title of one series of Mary-Kate and Ashley books, Two of a Kind (Stine, 2000), suggests that, like ‘two peas in a pod’, the twins are duplicates of each other: two of the same thing. On the other hand, in Just Like Me (Neasi, 2002: 14), Jennifer and Julie have identical bodies (‘She has long brown hair, Just like me! She has big brown eyes. Just like me!’) but have some different tastes and interests. Julie likes to clean the house and Jennifer doesn’t. Julie likes pancakes and Jennifer doesn’t. They also have different tastes in clothes. Julie likes to wear dresses and Jennifer doesn’t. Likewise, even though Pat and Isobel (The Twins at St Clare’s) look the same, their personalities are different. Whilst Isobel wants to conform to the school rules, Pat willingly breaks them.

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This idea of opposition is mirrored in psychological research about twins and has provided one further plot device in film. For instance, Burlingham’s (1952) and Koch’s (1966) famous twin studies utilised notions of the ‘passive’ and ‘active’ twin, exploring the different degrees of dominance/submissiveness in twins.9 In a similar vein, representations of twins in film sometimes position one twin as ‘good’ and the other as ‘evil’ (for example, psychotic twin Terry and her identical twin sister Ruth in the film The Dark Mirror, 1946). In these examples, twins are constructed as opposites, different parts, or two halves of one whole. Notwithstanding these differences, identical twins are at the forefront of our cultural imaginings of twins. Thus, if people look alike, we might say they ‘look like twins’. The following chapters will also continue to demonstrate the prevalence of stereotypes of twin sameness amongst the twins and parents in this study. Importantly, this construction of twinship serves to position twins outside of the cultural category of the person; defined through sameness, twins are assumed to lack individuality. Not surprisingly, parenting guides encourage parents of twins to foster the development of individuality in their children (thus bringing them in line with this cultural ideal). Amongst other things, parenting guides advise parents to take time to address each twin separately, to read stories to each child separately and to spend time with each twin on their own. They should not compare their twins but should encourage them to develop their own friendships and interests. Parents should dress their child twins in differently coloured outfits in order to help others to recognise them as two separate people, and to help the twins themselves to formulate a sense of how they are different from each other. Parents should thus avoid referring to their children as ‘the twins’ or giving them rhyming names or names that begin with the same letter (Cooper, 2004; Pearlman and Ganon, 2000). Often parents are advised to treat their twins equally, especially when they are younger. However, Friedman’s recent guide challenges this conventional wisdom. Her fourth guideline for helping parents raise ‘emotionally healthy twins’ states: ‘Don’t attempt to provide a “fair and equal” childhood for your twins.’ For her, treating twins differently communicates their uniqueness (Friedman, 2008: 12). Physical space can be an important resource for twins too: Having one’s own space, in a separate location, even if it is one half of a shared room, or a separate drawer, is a helpful tool in seeing one’s self as a unique and separate individual. If twins share a bedroom, give them the opportunity to customize their half of the room by

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choosing their own bedspreads, linens and posters for their walls (Pearlman and Ganon, 2000: 90). Mirroring academic accounts of child development, these parenting guides are often divided up into chapters that discuss different points of twins’ development (for example, newborn, toddlers, primary school, secondary school, adolescence and adulthood) and pinpoint adolescence as an important stage in the progression towards developing a unique identity. Speaking about ‘adolescent development: from thirteen to seventeen’, one guide states: The unrelenting surge towards adulthood is at full throttle by now. Physical development is well under way, and there is a deepening desire among teens to establish their own identity (Pearlman and Ganon, 2000: 40). Twins, especially identical twins, are commonly said to find this task more difficult than other children. Again, this reflects academic research on twins. As Davis and Davis (2004b) note, psychoanalytic research has tended to focus on the ‘problems’ that twins have in developing their unique identities. As such, twins have been thought to be prone to forming confused identities or to functioning as one person (Ortmeyer, 1970). Often one explanation given for this is that others, as well as the twins themselves, have always conceived of the twins as a unit, as one of a ‘them’. Twins should therefore be encouraged to be individuals from childhood in order to make this task of differentiation easier (Cooper, 2004: 173). Indeed, given that adolescence is constructed as an important stage within identity development, it is no surprise that one parenting guide warns that social attitudes towards ‘adolescent’ twins dressing alike may be less positive than they had been when they were younger children: Identically dressed babies are delightful, five-year-old look alike cute, but adolescents who dress the same are slightly disturbing. Adults are suspected of doing it only for fun, and the elderly couple who still dress alike are regarded as slightly sad. A butterfly, ready to fly, who had chosen to remain in his chrysalis might inspire some similar regret (Rosambeau, 1987: 164). As we will see in Part II of this book, this is a perspective held by many of the twins and parents in this study.

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These ‘expert systems’ (Giddens, 1991) therefore provide help and advice on a specific set of children, child twins, and participate in the process of constructing knowledge, expectations and understandings about them. As Giddens (1991: 2) notes, these are ‘not just works “about” social processes but materials which in some part constitute them’. Togetherness Alongside these discourses of twin sameness run notions of twin togetherness. A recent newspaper article entitled ‘Meet the twins born a school year apart’ (Steele, 2008) draws on this theme. The twins, born in the UK either side of midnight on the last official day of the academic year, stirred anxiety because they may be placed in different year groups when they start to attend school. This apart-ness is presented as unthinkable because twins should be together. Children’s stories involving child twins reflect similar messages. For example, the back cover of Jacqueline Wilson’s Double Act (1995) tells us that ‘Ruby and Garnet are ten-yearold twins. Identical. They do everything together’ (italics in original). Similarly, the opening lines of The Cherry Twins state: Charlie and Cheryl were cheerful little cherries. Both were full of fun and chatter and were never apart. They were twins you see. They did everything together. They even spoke at the same time (Fisher, 1983: 28). It seems no coincidence, then, to have the twins depicted as cherries who obviously are both physically small and physically joined together by a stem. As Moses’ (1993) poem Twins puts it: We’re hard to pull apart We stick to each other like glue Hence, where one goes, the other will follow! In line with this, twins are sometimes metaphorically represented as a ‘team’. For instance, in the Disney film The Parent Trap, identical twin girls plot to reunite their (divorced) parents. Along the way the twins get up to all sorts of mischief whilst trying to make their father’s girlfriend leave him. The woman is powerless to stop their jokes and pranks that in the end result in her leaving. Thus, we do get the impression that twins are ‘double trouble’. Given their state of togetherness, it is often implied that twins will experience greater difficulty in achieving independence than other

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children. In her twin study, Burlingham explained that ‘in contrast with the normal course of events, our twin children could be observed to develop two early emotional ties at a time when other children establish one tie only; that to the mother’ (1952: 53). Similarly, one twin parenting guide states: While your twins are growing up and learning to function independently of you, they have the extra task of growing away from each other and developing this sense of self. This process, called individuation, means becoming a complete person, with an ability to form functional relationships with others (Cooper, 2004: 172, 173). Thus, whilst other (singleton) children only have to ‘separate’ from their parents, child twins have to ‘separate’ from both their parents and each other. In this sense, twins represent an intensified version of child ‘dependency’. We will return to this theme at the end of the chapter. Parents should encourage their children to become independent: Being grown up is a two-way process. It means being given more independence and freedom on the one hand, and more responsibility on the other. Youngsters need to be given responsibility not only for doing some of their own tasks – making their own bed, tidying and cleaning their own room – but also others around the home … Adolescents need time on their own with their parents (Sandbank, 1988: 142). Parents also need to think about their twins’ schooling arrangements; should they be placed in the same classes or different classes? Often some kind of separation is advised, usually after an initial period of staying together when the twins first start school. For instance, TAMBA suggests that even though there are no right or wrong answers to this question, ‘[i]n the beginning, as long as the children enjoy each other’s company and are not overly competitive, they are likely to benefit from starting [school] together’ (Stevens, 2001: 14). Cooper provides some further advice in relation to secondary school: Being in the same class is not usually the ideal option at secondary level … Adolescents are more touchy and in greater need of privacy than younger children, and thrive better if they have space. This applies especially to those same-sex pairs where there are marked physical or intellectual differences between them (2004: 282).

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Keeping twins together when they are older can therefore be problematic, particularly if one twin is more academically able than the other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, separating from one’s twin is often represented as a potentially traumatic event. In her academic study of twins, Koch likens this to the loss of a vital limb: A more appropriate parallel perhaps for the sudden separation of twins at school since the identicals have typically never been separated from birth, would be the loss of an arm or leg, because, as here, every experience must seem incomplete and strange without the sib as part of it (1966: 138). Again we gain some impression of identical twins representing the epitome of togetherness and interdependence; they have never been separated since birth. Indeed, reflecting Koch’s academic account, Sandbank (1988: 133) makes this perspective clear in her parenting guide: ‘some twins, particularly identical twins, may decide that they do not wish to separate and continue to do everything together.’ Because, as Taylor (1981: 84) suggests, stereotypes function to condense similarities within groups as well as intensifying differences between groups, these notions of twin togetherness (like those of sameness) should be seen as emerging in relation to the normative model of ‘siblingship’. Thus, whilst twins have each other, a companion of the same age, siblings are singletons and of different ages. So intertwined are notions of twinship and togetherness that ‘twins’ (rather than brothers, sisters or siblings in general) may be used as metaphors for togetherness. As such, we may talk about ‘twin towns’, ‘twin buggies’ and ‘twin towers’, all of which capture the plurality and relatedness of twinship. We may also say that people who spend a lot of time together are ‘just like twins’. Whilst siblings represent the ‘normative’ model of siblingship, conjoined twins mark the point at which togetherness becomes socially unacceptable. Although in metaphorical terms, (identical) twins may be ‘stuck together’, they still carry the possibility and indeed the expectation of future independence. In contrast, by literally embodying physical togetherness, conjoined twins bring no such hope of development and progress. These twins cannot ‘split up’ from each other at will. Thus, the very physicality of their bodies implies a concentrated version of the natural interdependency of twinship. Possibly this explains why, in a documentary about their mission to be separated (Dying to be Apart, BBC1, 1 September 2003), Laden and

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Laleh Bijani were described by the leading surgeon as children despite the fact that they were 29 years old. Conjoined twins may share areas of common sensation and experience divided authorship of action. Indeed, it is because parts of their bodies are joined together that it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Contravening dominant Western assumptions that one body contains one autonomous self, these joined bodies have to be ‘corrected’ through potentially life-threatening separation operations (Murray, 2001; Shildrick, 2000). Newspaper and television coverage often demonstrates how the ‘split’ will be achieved. For instance, Britain’s Conjoined Twins: Faith and Hope (Channel 4, 19 February 2009) showed how Faith and Hope’s bodies were joined together and how their bodies would be divided up. They shared one liver, their intestines were fused and they were joined by vital veins and arteries. To achieve separation, the liver would be split, the intestines divided up equally and joining arteries and veins would be cut and closed up. Used as a visual aide, a diagram of their conjoined bodies was shown and the various ‘splitting procedures’ superimposed onto them. As such, we were able to see how the conjoined bodies could potentially become two separate bodies. Such operations may be considered to be part of a cultural normalisation process whereby the physical bodies of conjoined twins are brought into line with Western notions of personhood: The issue of surgical intervention and modification is taken as settled in principle, and subject only to technical feasibility, as though there is nothing at stake except an inappropriate body … The privileging of singularity and autonomy so evident in Western discourse, and the value accorded to bodily self-determination combine to erase any consideration that there might be other ways of being (Shildrick, 2000: 83). In line with this, Laden and Laleh’s operation was termed ‘operation hope’, pointing to the way in which the ‘new’ separate lives that potentially await conjoined twins are constructed as sources of freedom and liberation. Indeed, newspaper coverage of the operation (McKie, 2003; Thornton, 2003) drew attention to the achievement of separation alongside the tragedy of the twins’ deaths. It is precisely because these twins exist beyond the boundaries of social acceptability that they bring our cultural values into such sharp focus and show up where these boundaries lie (Dreger, 1998). Hence, as ‘monsters’ of nature (Shildrick, 2000: 80), they mark the point at which being ‘together’ is no longer socially acceptable, even in childhood.

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Closeness Since twins are said to spend a great deal of time together, it is possibly no surprise that they are also often constructed as having a close personal relationship with each other. In her parenting guide, Friedman, an American psychotherapist, refers to this as the ‘twin mystique’: Stereotypically, most people think of twins as intensely close soul mates connected to each other through a kind of sibling ESP. Many of us assume that one twin not only knows what the other is thinking and feeling but can automatically provide what the other needs. Twins are seen as inhabiting their own private world for which only they hold the map (Friedman, 2008: 4). It is this ‘private’ world that is sometimes linked to language delay in twins. Thus, Zazzo (1978), a French psychologist writing on twins, proposed that the abilities of twins to read each other’s facial expressions and gestures could mean that they had less need to communicate verbally. It is also often linked with the development of an autonomous ‘twin language’ (or cryptophasia) which consists of sounds, words and syntax that are not those of the common language (Zazzo, 1978). The latter feature is upheld in some twin parenting guides. For example, Sandbank (1988: 41) suggests that twins may develop their own language that is unintelligible to others. Case’s parenting guide also continues this focus on the ‘exotic’, beginning her chapter entitled Parallel Lives by stating: Parallelism and extrasensory perception in the lives of identical twins demonstrate a psychic relationship which is far from being understood (Case, 1991: 117). Similarly, in a ‘Rugrats’ tale, Reptar’s Surprise Visit (Schoberle, 1999), we see that, unlike the other characters, different-sex twins Phil and Lil are depicted as sharing one thought bubble, implying that they either know what the other is thinking, have the same thought or actually share their thoughts. Identical twins are frequently thought to be especially close. In her twin study, Koch (1966) concluded that identical twins were closer than fraternals and that, generally speaking, all of the twin pairs were closer than matched singletons. But such representations do not simply remain within the academic world. As with those ideas of sameness and togetherness,

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they trickle down into our everyday understandings of twins. Hence, in line with Koch’s conclusion, one parenting guide notes: The twin bond is often stronger in identical twins than it is in fraternal twins – identical twins share the same genes and chromosomes and have similar interests and temperaments. Like all children, identical twins are very focused on their own needs, but unlike non-twins or fraternal twins, identical twins tend to be more aware of each other. Identical twins often establish and maintain a close social profile (Pearlman and Ganon, 2000: 85). In contrast, these notions of psychic and mystical connectedness seem less predominant in psychological accounts of siblingship. Academic research suggests that siblings can develop shared understandings through private jokes and phrases (see Powell and Ogle, 1985). However, whilst this also implies some degree of solidarity, others would understand the language used. Since the autonomous language of twins involves words no one understands, the nature of their relationship is portrayed as being more exclusive and elusive than the sibling relationship. Alongside these accounts of shared understandings and harmony are academic accounts of sibling rivalry. For instance, siblings and twins alike may compete for the attention of their mother; however, when age hierarchies are present, older and younger siblings may compete for power, control and specific roles (Newman, 1994). Because (unlike siblings) twins are the same age, Burlingham argues that they cannot claim the ‘prerogatives of the elder nor the indulgence usually afforded to the younger’ (1952: 53). According to her, twins ‘have a more acute rivalry to cope with than is the case for ordinary siblings’ (1952: 87). More popular representations of twin conflict suggest that this may be perceived as both dysfunctional and undesirable. Hence, within some twin parenting guides, rivalry and competition are both discussed as potentially problematic experiences for twins. For example, keeping twins in the same class at school may lead teachers to compare the twins and encourage them to compete against each other. However, separating them may lead the twins to experience too heavy an emotional burden, being both separated from home and from their fellow twin (Case, 1991: 63, 66, 67). Jealousy between twins is said to be especially intense: Jealousy is an emotion that twins probably experience earlier than other children, and for this reason it may be particularly strong (Sandbank, 1988: 36).

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Comparisons made between twins are particularly problematic during the school years, when twins may be compared for their academic achievements. Comparisons between twins should thus be avoided, as should competitive games and, wherever possible, twins should be treated as equals. This prevents twins from measuring their own achievements against those of their fellow twin (Sandbank, 1988: 93). Stories about twins demonstrate a similar ambivalence, conveying notions of love and friendship as well as competition and rivalry. In The Bobbsey Twins in the Country, both sets of twins are described as being close to each other: ‘Nan had her friends, as all big girls have, but Bert, her twin brother, was her dearest chum, as Freddie was Flossie’s’ (Hope, 2002: 5). One’s fellow twin is therefore one’s closest friend and friends are no substitute for one’s twin. Similarly, in P.S. Wish You Were Here (Stine, 2000), the main plot describes how Ashley needs the help of her twin sister Mary-Kate, in order to sort out a problem she is having at her school. Ashley constantly tries phoning and emailing her sister but she gets no reply. She grows angry and frustrated, but this only serves to highlight the extent of her reliance on her sister and thus the extent of their closeness. Later on, we find out that the lack of contact is due to an email problem and Ashley’s anger resides: ‘being mad at each other was so horrible … I was so glad that Mary-Kate and I were friends again. It was the best!’ (Stine, 2000: 74). As such, any sense that the girls may be on bad terms is in the end dispelled. ‘Darker’ representations of love and hate appear in The Silent Twins (Wallace, 1987) which tells the real-life story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, who developed a secret language, detached themselves from the outside world and became locked within their personal battles to both escape from and reaffirm their closeness. Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers (1995) similarly tells a tale of love, jealousy and death. Two twins (Mickey and Eddie) are separated at birth, Eddie staying with his birth mother Mrs Johnstone and Mickey going to live with the middle class cleaner who works for her. Unaware that they are twins, Eddie and Mickey become blood brothers and vow to defend and stand by each other. Since the mothers fear their sons will die if they ever find out they are twins, they strive to keep the twins apart. However, their affection for each other overpowers their mothers’ attempts and the brothers continue to see each other. Hence, twin closeness is conveyed as both natural and inevitable. However, like June and Jennifer, these twins are also jealous of each other. Mickey wishes that he could ‘wear clean clothes, talk properly like, do sums and history like’ Eddie (Russell, 1995: 41), while Eddie wishes that he could ‘Kick a ball and climb a tree

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like, run around with dirty knees like’ Mickey (Russell, 1995: 42). Later on, Russell focuses his attention on the divisive violence that exists between the twins as adults. Reproducing suspicions that twins find the same people sexually attractive, Eddie asks Mickey’s wife to marry him (unaware that she is now already married to his twin brother). Their romance is brief but, when Mickey finds out, he feels that Eddie (a middle class, well-educated man who, in his eyes, has everything) has taken from him the only good thing in his life. Because their pact of love and loyalty cannot be broken, he shoots Eddie and the police shoot Mickey. Twin closeness is therefore discursively represented as ambivalent; incorporating love and hate, harmony and conflict. Many aspects of the representations considered above also imply once again that twinship represents a concentrated version of siblingship: singleton siblings are close but twins are closer. Indeed, it is the very fact that twins are said to be so close that questions are often raised in relation to their abilities to develop meaningful intimate relationships with a different (romantic) partner. One newspaper article fittingly entitled ‘The Other Half’ explains the problems this closeness can bring. According to the author ( Jarvie, 2002), identical twins in particular may find it difficult to keep their twin relationship outside of the ‘couple’ relationship. Dating a twin, so Jarvie maintains, may also mean dating their twin sibling too. The very fact that this ‘problem’ emerges at all signifies the presence of another dominant representation of twin closeness summed up in the title of this article: twins as soul mates. Although we may search for our ‘true’ life companion, someone who understands us perfectly or knows us ‘inside out’, twins (especially identical twins) are thought to have already found this ‘other half’, the person who makes them ‘complete’. Because of this, twins are expected to find it difficult to establish a new relationship that excludes their fellow twin. As might be expected, this ‘problem’ also emerges in twin parenting guides. Thus, Sandbank states, ‘identical twins who have been very close may find it difficult to walk out of the Secret Garden to find happiness with someone else’ (1988: 153). She makes it clear that if twins choose to marry, it is the partner that should come first and the twin that should come second: ‘twins need to be aware of their new partner’s needs as well as that of their twin. Partners who feel confident that they come first will feel happier about the twin coming second’ (1988: 155). In this sense, the intensity of the twin bond has to be moderated to make way for the new romantic partner. Conjoined twins who have not been separated

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also cause ‘concern’ for this reason. Unable to leave each other’s sides, these twins cannot form relationships with another partner and spatially exclude their fellow twin from it. Notwithstanding these concerns, it seems that twins are not expected to completely give up on being emotionally close. Whilst this has to be modified, it is not absolutely forfeited. Hence, an episode of the TV chat show Life’s Too Short (BBC1, 25 June 2002) dedicated an entire programme to reuniting some quarrelsome adult twins. In one case, Emilia and Becky talked of experiencing problems communicating with each other. In a bid to ‘mend’ the ‘broken’ relationship, the host ( Jill McCullough) went about reuniting the twins: firstly, asking them to complement each other; then to remember a time when they angered each other; and finally, with some semi-structured help from herself, to work through how they should communicate to avoid future arguments and misunderstandings. The very fact that arguing twins feature on a show aimed at solving family problems suggests that adult twins are still expected to get along. When the two twins hug at the end of the show, it seems that the host has been successful in reaching this ideal. A similar sense of ‘completeness’ emerges in the reuniting of Sally and Miles (different-sex twins) in the Australian soap Home and Away (Channel 5, March 2008). Parted during childhood, Miles searches out and meets Sally in a desperate attempt to jog her memory and make her realise that he is in fact her twin. Even before realising that Miles is her twin brother, Sally feels a strong connection with him. Once Sally finally realises that Miles is her twin brother, her feelings become understandable to her and she cries with relief. The value that we place in twins being close may reflect our cultural valuing of sociality (our ability to establish meaningful social relationships). Embodying the very epitome of closeness, identical twins may come to represent one positive dimension of our ‘human essence’. Indeed, whilst dominant Western notions of personhood privilege the self-contained, independent and unique human being, alongside this there is also some appreciation of the connectedness and interdependence of human relationships. For instance, Ribbens (1994) has pointed out that the values of ‘individuality’ and ‘sociality’ underpin family life; on the one hand, we want to raise children as unique individuals and, on the other, the family order is ideologically defined through notions of parenting and love relations. Moreover, as Davis and Davis (2004b) note, Westerners do not always see themselves as bounded and self-contained units completely cut off from other people. This may also be balanced alongside a sense of mutuality and relatedness.

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Thus, children are expected to bond with others as well as growing in independence and uniqueness. Identical twins may therefore renew our faith in our capacity to be companionate beings and, as such, may also become a source of envy. As Farmer puts it, the ‘unease, the fascination, the longing, is common to us all’ (1996: 331). From this perspective, if twins cannot be close, then there is no hope for the rest of us. In this sense, then, our attitudes towards older child (identical looking) twins may be rather ambivalent. Whilst we want these twins to be individuals (and not ‘twins’), we also value them for their ‘mythic’ closeness (as twins) that is signified through their identicalness!

The continuum of siblingship Two important conclusions have emerged from this analysis of twinship and childhood. Firstly, twinship is often represented as a more intense form of siblingship (see Figure 2.2). Whilst singletons represent the normative model of siblingship, identical twins represent the very epitome of what being a ‘twin’ is. Stereotypes of identical twins inform us that these twins look the same, are the same age, spend all their time together and are so close that they may experience problems forming relationships with other (romantic) partners. Nonidentical twins, on the other hand, represent a diluted form of twinship that is closer to the normative model of siblingship. These cultural classificatory distinctions between different types of twins and twins and siblings are underpinned and legitimated by scientific discourses concerning zygosity. One TAMBA ‘factsheet’ outlines the difference between these different types of siblings:

Singleton siblings Look different Different ages Singular Can spend time together Can be close Figure 2.2

Non-identical twins Twins but look different Same age Spend time together Are close

The continuum of siblingship

Identical twins Twins that look the same Same age Always together Are very close

Conjoined twins Twins that look the same Same age Bodies are joined Embody closeness

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Monozygotic twins are also known as identical or uniovular. They arise when one fertilised egg splits early in the pregnancy (within 13 days of fertilization): the cause of this division is unknown. Monozygotic twins are always of the same sex, because division of the fertilised ovum produces two genetically identical individuals … Dizygotic twins are also known as fraternal, non-identical or binovular. These twins occur when double ovulation takes place and both eggs are fertilised separately. They can be conceived at different times, but always within the same menstrual cycle (i.e. within a few days of each other), a process known as superfecundation … DZ twins are no more alike than any other brothers and sisters and have an equal chance of being of the same sex or of different sexes (TAMBA, 2002). Sandbank adds conjoined twins within her classification of identical twins: Identical twins are also known as uniovular or monozygotic (MZ) twins. This is because they come from one ovum, or egg, which is fertilised by one sperm which then becomes a zygote, or germ cell. This zygote then splits into two cells which eventually grow into two genetically identical bodies. If the two cells remain partly attached they may grow into conjoined (‘siamese’) twins (1988: 19–21). Therefore, identical twins (including conjoined twins) are more similar than non-identical twins, who are said to be just as different to each other as siblings. Whilst singletons provide a ‘normative’ model of siblingship, conjoined twins represent the dysfunctional nature of togetherness and the point at which twinship becomes socially unacceptable. Conjoined twins are literally one and the same, their very embodiment joining them together and keeping them close. Contravening the cultural notions of personhood that the singleton child promises to uphold, these twins are stigmatised as ‘monsters’ and drastic action is often taken to ‘split’ them up. In many ways non-identical twins can be said to occupy an anomalous position within this classificatory scheme (being twins and being different); however, the dominance of stereotypes of twin sameness may work to ensure that this discrepancy is covered over and the distinction between twin and sibling is maintained. Indeed, as Jenkins points out, this is one principle function of stereotypes:

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It is in the nature of stereotypes to emphasise a small number of putative similarities between the stereotyped rather than their infinite array of particularities and differences. Stereotypes are extremely condensed symbols of collective identification (2004: 128). Certainly, this book will demonstrate that since stereotypes of sameness are so dominant, non-identical twins can become concealed, both in the sense that we do not really think of twins being different looking and in the sense that, as a result of this, we cannot, in our everyday lives, visibly classify different-looking twins as twins at all. As we will see in Chapter 3, some parents may not classify their twins as ‘twins’ because they think they look too different. Similarly, in Chapter 4 we will observe how different-looking twins may become invisible twins because they fall outside of the dominant cultural stereotype of twin sameness.

Twinship as an intensification of the symbol of ‘the child’ This analysis has also shown that there is considerable overlap between discourses of childhood and twinship. Whilst children are constructed as dependent beings in the process of becoming unique persons, twins, epitomised through the stereotype of identical twins, are constructed as interdependent ‘soul mates’ who are ‘carbon copies’ of each other and do ‘everything together’. In this sense, twinship can be seen as another way of being a child. However, because twinship is constructed as a more intense version of ‘normative’ siblingship and because, in line with this, twins are said to be doubly dependent (both on their parents and their fellow twin) and doubly lacking in uniqueness (both because they are young and because they are twins), twins represent a concentrated version of the symbol of the child. This is not to argue that social expectations about how twins should grow up are inherently different to those regarding other children. Like other children, twins are expected to grow up and become unique, independent and autonomous adults. These values characterise our cultural understanding of how children (in general) should ‘grow up’. ‘Western childhood makes the transition to adulthood problematic’ (Allan and Crow, 2001: 37) precisely because, as Jenks (2005) pointed out, childhood and adulthood are still, to a large extent, defined through their mutual opposition. For child twins, however, this opposition is exaggerated because they are denied their individuality and independence both as children and as twins. Twins therefore face a series of intensified contradictions: whilst they are expected to be the same, they are expected

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to become different; whilst they are expected to be together and close, they are expected to become independent.10 The following chapters of this book explore how twins and parents of twins utilise, practice, modify and resist these various discourses and social expectations.

Notes 1. It is important to note that the ‘West’ refers to much more than just a geographical area. Indeed, it is an ideological concept (denoting ‘advanced’, ‘modern’ industrial’ societies) which has been used in opposition to the ‘East’ (denoting ‘traditional’, ‘exotic’ societies). However, my purpose here is to try to set some limits around the applicability of the discourses I outline, so as not to imply that they are universal. 2. The notions of autonomy and independence, so central to this discourse of individualism, are, as Ribbens (1994: 48) points out, fundamentally male, white, middle class and, as we will shall see, adult. 3. The child moved from ‘figurative thought’ (which allowed the child to focus on the immediate present) to ‘operative intelligence’ (which allowed the child to reflexively engage with objects and thus displayed logical cognitive processes) ( Jenks, 2005: 22). 4. According to Parsons, the social system is divided into three sub-systems: the cultural sub-system, the physical sub-system and the personality sub-system, all of which work to ensure the maintenance of the whole system. However, it is the latter which is most relevant when discussing socialisation. The unsocialised child is the primary concern of the personality sub-system, which needs to ensure that the child develops into a competent ‘adult’ ( Jenks, 2005: 16). 5. In practice, this cultural ideal takes many forms and does not necessary conform to a linear movement from dependence to independence (Allan and Crow, 2001). For example, children may live away from home whilst at university, then return home, then leave home again later to set up an independent household. 6. Fordism and post-Fordism are terms used to denote the different economic and social systems that characterise the modern industrial and ‘post-industrial’ eras. Fordism is associated with mechanised assembly line mass production, standardised products and routinised work. Post-Fordism on the other hand is linked to the decline of ‘heavy industry’ and the rise of the technological era, where information and services become more important. Emphasis is placed on establishing consumer choice and producing quality goods. Firms therefore have to become more flexible in their organisation of work. Computer-controlled multi-purpose machinery allows for more variation and customisation of products (as styles and fashions change). Workers have to be flexible, offering a wide range of skills. These broad economic changes also embody social and political changes. Thus, Fordism is associated with the significance of worker identity, social class solidarity and universalist welfare benefits, whilst post-Fordism is characterised by a fragmentation of group interests and a move towards individuals fashioning their own identities and lifestyles (Murray, 1989).

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7. Jamie Bulger was abducted and murdered by two 10-year-old boys in Bootle, England. 8. The dates and channels of television programmes and adverts relate to their airing on English TV. These may vary according to different regions. 9. For example, Burlingham’s (1952) famous study identified Bill as ‘active’ and Bert as ‘passive’ (but also emphasised the capacity of twins to ‘swap roles’). 10. At this juncture, it is important to note that I am not trying to make a value judgement about twins. Rather, I am teasing out the mismatch between dominant (Western) notions of personhood and stereotypes of twinship: that is, I am showing how our culture, to a large extent, sets twins apart as problematic.

3 Parents

Parent-child relations represent a structuring context within which children and, in this case, child twins live out their lives. Parents of twins make decisions about their twin children and, in doing so, communicate messages of identity on their behalf. As such, parents are important ‘players’ in the social process of identity construction. This chapter examines how parenting philosophies and specific parenting practices construct childhood and twinship in particular ways. It explores the ‘mission statements’ that parents make to convey their strategies for ‘raising’ their twins alongside the more everyday decisions made in relation to dressing their twins, placing them in classes at school, allocating bedrooms within the family home and naming them. As the previous chapter showed, since these types of decisions feature heavily in twin parenting guides, this allows some insight into the ways in which parents draw upon or discount normative notions of ‘how to bring up twins’.

Children and the family Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field set the broad theoretical backdrop for this analysis. Drawing on Bourdieu, the ‘family’ can be conceptualised as a social ‘field’ (Bourdieu, 1993). Underpinned by power relations that are defined according to the distribution of various types of ‘capital’, it represents one social space within which children are encouraged to develop various forms of ‘habitus’ (May, 1996). The everyday decisions that parents make about and for their children constitute part of the ‘family habitus’ (Tomanovic, 2004) that structures the everyday lives of children. Hence, we will see that in deciding how to dress their twins, how to allocate bedroom space 51

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and whether or not to place their twins together or apart at school, parents ‘provide children with various resources and ways of using them’ (Tomanovic, 2004: 343) and thus encourage particular embodied ways of being. This is not to perpetuate a traditional top-down model of socialisation whereby parents shape their passive children. Childhood sociologists have resisted such models of passivity by, for instance, showing how children participate in shaping their post-divorce family lives (Smart, 2001), how children effectively manage their own self-care (Mayall, 1994) and carve out spaces to display and activate a sense of their own autonomy (Punch, 2004; Solberg, 1997; Zeither, 2001). Similarly, Part II of this book demonstrates how children have their own roles to play in training others how to see and identify them and in shaping their own social worlds. However, children do not necessarily act within situations of their own choosing. These sociologists have therefore also acknowledged how adult power may constrain the lives of children in certain ways. Indeed, there is increasing agreement that taking account of children’s agency does not just mean thinking about the things that children ‘do’ or the views and opinions they have, but also of their power or, possibly more importantly, their lack of power to influence their own and other people’s lives (Mayall, 2001: 3).

Conceptualising parent-child relations Berry Mayall and Leena Alanen have proposed the notion of ‘generation’ as one way of exploring the power relations between children and parents within the family. Generation can be thought of as both an objective structure that underpins family life and as a matrix of ‘internal connections’ (Alanen, 2001: 20) through which people become constructed and positioned as ‘children’ and ‘adults’. In this sense it is characterised by structure and agency: the generational ordering is built up through social interaction and also acts on us as an external force of social life. People within the family are assigned to the structural categories of child and adult/parent. This generational structure affects the actions of children and parents in families. Equally, their actions can also themselves feed into and shape the generational structure. In Chapter 2, we saw how ideas about children have emerged within society, and importantly how the category of the child is also a relational category (existing as it does in relation to the category of the ‘adult’). This is an inherently unequal relationship: the ‘child’ is not only that identified by adults as ‘non-adult’ (defined through lack), but the child

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is also seen as being in need of adult wisdom and protection. As Mayall puts it: Adults have divided up the social order into two major groups – adults and children, with specific conditions surrounding the lives of each group: provisions, constraints and requirements, laws, rights, responsibilities and privileges (Mayall, 2000: 120). As a subordinate social group, children’s lives are shaped and constrained by adults in certain ways. In the political realm, children have limited access to rights and are subject to age-related controls. In the cultural realm, children are commonly defined as incompetent dependents and may be subject to expressions of corporeal power/punishment. In the economic realm, children are materially dependent on adults (Wyness, 2006: 30–3). Western children, removed from the world of work, have been pushed into the domestic spheres of the home and school. Hence, contemporary childhood within post-industrial and developed societies is both increasingly familialised and increasingly institutionalised. The home and school thus constitute the two primary sites of childhood and are often taken to be the standard against which a ‘proper’ childhood can be measured. Despite the rise of female employment and the growing provision of pre-school education, the organisation and management of children’s lives, especially in broadly liberal welfare state regimes like the UK, New Zealand and the USA, are still seen mainly as the responsibility of mothers (Edwards, 2002). As Alanen (1998: 3) notes, parents (usually mothers) are ‘normally in command of more material, social and other resources than children, and thus in a more powerful position to shape the everyday conditions of child-life’. Returning to Bourdieu, then, we may say that these power relations underpinning the family ‘field’ are constructed in relation to various forms of ‘capital’, whether that be economic capital (for instance, money), social capital (access to valuable social relationships), cultural capital (various forms of ‘legitimate’ knowledge) or symbolic capital (prestige and status) (Jenkins, 1992: 85). Importantly, the generational ordering and broader social processes which relate to the parents in this study are also gendered (Mayall, 2002: 41). Discourses of ‘maternal instinct’ and ‘children’s needs’ position mothers as being responsible for meeting children’s needs (Lawler, 1999; Nicholson, 1993). Mothers, so the story goes, have a biological drive to have children and this ‘is a precursor to the drive to nurture those children’ (Nicholson, 1993: 209).

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So how did the parents in my empirical study locate and define their own and their children’s roles? How did they constitute and bring meaning to the categories of ‘parent’ and ‘child’? These are important questions to ask, since parents’ views on the role of (adult) parents and children in the family give us some insight into the intergenerational power relationships that underpin their parenting styles and practices. Before exploring some answers to these questions, let’s meet the parents and their twins.

The parents and their twins Clare and Anthony were parents of non-identical twins Ash and Harry. Aged eight, Ash and Harry were the youngest twins in the sample. Mike and Allison had two sons, Liam and Dan, non-identical twins (aged 17). Caroline, aged 32, was a lone twin (whose sister died shortly after birth) and a single parent to three children: Charlotte and Hannah, non-identical twins (aged 15), and their half-sister Ellie (aged 12). Sue and Stuart had three children. The twins, Emma and Ruth (aged 13), were unsure of their zygosity. Their parents, however, thought they were likely to be identical. They also looked very alike. Emma and Ruth had an older brother John (aged 16) who was also living at home. Janet and David had four children. Their different-sex twin children, Adam and Olivia (aged 16), still lived at home, but their older children Craig (aged 25) and Naomi (aged 24) had left home. Pam and Malcolm had three children: Rebecca and Andrea, who were identical twins aged 23, and an older son Jeremy. Jeremy lived away from home and did not take part in the study. Although she had moved away from home once before, Rebecca now lived at home. Cheryl and Jonathan had four children. Anne and Brian were differentsex, non-identical adult twins, aged 24. Anne lived away from home with her partner and two-year-old child and Brian lived with his parents, but was studying at university. Anne and Brian had two younger brothers, Roger (aged 19) and Sean (aged 16), who both lived at home. Sean did not take part in the study. This family did not want me to go into the house to interview them, but asked me to send them questionnaires instead. Whilst I was able to speak with most of the members of these families, some mothers of twins took part in the study without their twins or their partners. Lindsey was about to adopt non-identical twin boys aged 4. Jenny was the mother of non-identical, different-sex twins, Dominic and Louise (aged 3). She also had one other younger child who was 16 months old.

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In other cases, only one or both of the twins took part in the study (without their parents or any other siblings they may have had). The details of these twins are given in Appendix B. A list of all the participants and the different family social class groupings is given in Appendix A.

Constituting parents and children Parents of twins talked of their strategies for bringing up their twins, and thus identified themselves as key socialising agents. Although most of the parental interviews involved mothers and fathers (interviewed together), usually it was the mother of the twins who communicated most information regarding these decisions. This, whilst possibly being a response to my own identity as a woman, also reflects the dominant cultural understanding of ‘mothers’ as carers of children. Mothers took a lead role in deciding how to dress their children. They were in charge of choosing, purchasing and making their children’s clothes. There is also some evidence to suggest that mothers were at the forefront of decisions concerning school classes and bedroom allocation. For instance, Pam explained that she had told the teacher to keep her children together at secondary school and Janet also explained how she had tried to put her different-sex twins into different rooms. Interestingly, despite this, mothers (like the fathers) also commonly spoke using the plural pronoun ‘we’ giving the impression of a ‘united front’; the presence of one ‘parental’ voice. This, as Ribbens points out (1994: 69), ‘signifies the ideology that parental authority is shared, rather than either father or mother taking over-riding control’. This form of talk, as we will see later on in Chapter 6, serves to communicate their dyadic status and is therefore one way in which parents signify that they are ‘doing parenting correctly’. However, behind this ‘front’ (Goffman, 1969) we catch glimpses of the control that mothers have over their children’s lives. There were some commonalities regarding the ways in which parents saw their own roles as parents and in their conceptualisations of the process of how children ‘grow up’. Parents drew attention to the importance of respecting their children’s views and opinions through giving them choices and respecting their decisions. Thus, Clare said she would not dress her children ‘the same’ if they objected and Jenny explained that she would not force her children to move into separate rooms. However, as we will see later on, the point at which parents felt their children’s decisions to be worthy of consideration

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revealed something of their constructions of childhood and where they thought their children were positioned along the developmental path towards adulthood. Commonly, parents conceptualised the process of growing up in ‘developmental’ terms, talking about ‘ages and stages’. We will see this theme re-emerge throughout this book, but a few examples will be beneficial at this point. Mike talked about the ‘early stages’ of his twins’ lives, and how twins were different from singleton siblings, who were at different ages and who were therefore also ‘at different stages’. Pam and Malcolm explained how their children had gone through the ‘biting stage’ as young children and the arguments as ‘teenagers’. Firmly positioned within the social institution of adulthood, Andrea and Rebecca were seen to be past the ‘gullible stage’ of believing ‘everything that everybody tells you’ (Pam). Similarly, Sue related her own teenage daughter’s begrudging attempts to help out around the home to her (teenage) ‘hormones’. Notwithstanding these commonalities, parents differed in relation to how they saw their children and their own status as parents. Mike described his and his wife Allison’s parenting style as ‘fairly liberal’. Mike told me that they wanted their children to ‘work hard and play hard’. In their joint interview, they recounted how their sons had organised parties at their home for their school friends who sometimes did not leave until the early hours of the morning. Although Allison made it clear that their children did ask their permission for such events, and that this, to use her words, made her children ‘good children’, Allison and Mike did not want their children to perceive them as parents. Their aim, as Mike told me, was to be ‘more friends with them rather than parents’. In line with this playing down of adult authority, decisions were reached by talking things through together. Thus, Allison recounted how, after buying Liam a t-shirt, she consulted Dan over what he would like bought for him, giving him the choice of a gift or just the money placed into his bank account. Their ideas about their children and their parenting roles have nevertheless changed over time. When their twins were younger, they felt they had to exert more control. However, now they see this as being less possible: Mike: I think as kids get older … there’s something about through the ages, that you know, you can, when you sort of just have them in control, and like for example, you strap them in the back of the car. Kate: Yeah.

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Mike: You’ve got total control, whereas now you haven’t have you? Allison: No. Mike: So we do tend to worry about them more now. As Allison put it later on, you have to ‘let them go’. Clare and Anthony had younger children than Allison and Mike; Ash and Harry aged eight, who were non-identical twins. They seemed to uphold a stronger adult-child boundary, seeing their young children as innocent children who were in need of protection from the dangers and risks of playing outside as well as adult knowledge and behaviours. They told me that, at present, they were ‘keeping them in like a little cocoon’ (Clare). Amongst other things, this involved censoring television programmes and (video) films so that they were not exposed to ‘too much swearing’ (Anthony). According to Anthony, ‘where sex and swearing come in, you know, they’re not at an age group where they can take that on board’. Being in the ‘early stages’ of development, these children are deemed incapable of dealing with this scenario. Hence, from Anthony’s point of view, monitoring and restricting access would stop them facing a situation they could not deal with and prevent them from becoming too ‘knowing’. Clare and Anthony wanted to preserve this innocence for as long as possible: Clare: Well our idea is that we try and keep ’em as young and innocent as we can. Anthony: When they need to know about things like that we’ll tell ’em, it’s as simple as that. You know, when they need to know about such things, we’ll tell ’em. Possibly Clare and Anthony were also conscious to maintain an image of themselves as ‘good parents’. In their joint interview, Janet and David emphasised the role of the family as a whole in helping each other out, sharing problems and resolving arguments. Indeed, they often described their family as ‘close’ and drew attention to the importance of social relationships within the family. The family was seen as an important place for children to learn about life and the norms of social behaviour. Janet explained: Janet: […] you should always have that opportunity of rubbing off all the rough edges when you’re at home. I’m sure that is what the family is for really. And so that when we do go out into the big world, you realise what is acceptable and what isn’t.

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The family, as a private space, is somewhere its members can argue, act as sounding boards for each other and help children to prepare for their eventual independent lives. Rather than identifying themselves as the sole caretakers and negotiators of family life, Janet and David emphasised how they, as well as the older siblings Naomi and Craig, had a role to play: David: Cos I mean Adam’s sat down with Olivia and helped her with her homework and Naomi’s done the same and they ask their advice, what they should do. Janet: Craig has helped. David: Yes and Naomi I think has helped as well. These older siblings also helped to resolve arguments. For instance, when Olivia refused to lend her twin brother Adam some coursework, David told me that their older brother ‘Craig was beside himself as well trying to reason’. Like Janet and David, Pam and Malcolm also thought that even though their eldest son lived away from home, he had a role to play in providing Andrea and Rebecca with advice and protection. As Pam told me, ‘even with Jeremy, they know if they’ve got a problem, they can speak to Jeremy about it’. Pam and Malcolm identified their twin children as ‘adults’ who should be free to learn from their own mistakes. As Pam said, ‘if they set their mind to do something, they’ll do it no matter how you try to deter them. You have to just say, “ok” and if it’s a mistake let them learn like a mistake’. Pam and Malcolm were cautious about making decisions on their children’s behalf, explaining that ‘we prefer what they prefer’ (Malcolm). Yet they also told me how, especially as younger children, they made decisions (for instance, relating to bed times) that their children might not have agreed with. It is evident from this brief introduction that parents’ narratives expressed different parenting styles, some being more prescriptive than others. Sociological research on parenting styles has sometimes attributed such differences to social class. For example, in her study of black and white American families with children aged eight to ten, Annette Lareau (2002) identified two distinct parenting styles: working class parents engage in the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’, whilst middle class parents engage in ‘concerted cultivation’. Working class parents (both white and black) saw their role as facilitating the ‘natural growth’ of their children through providing for their needs. They issue more directives to their children and uphold a strong and clear

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boundary between children and adults, which positions children as subordinate. With strong extended family ties, children often spend time in kin settings. In contrast, middle class parents (again, both white and black) actively foster the talents and skills of their children who are often engaged in extra-familial leisure activities. Parents reason with their children and encourage them to express their own views and opinions. Unlike the working class families, these children learn they have a right to have a say. ‘The idea that children’s desires should be taken seriously was routinely realized in the middle class families’ (Lareau, 2002: 773). As we noted in Chapter 1, the small sample size makes it difficult to fully explore the impact of social class. However, looking at the examples cited here, it seems that the impact of social class on the parents’ general parenting ‘ethos’ was, at best, slight. Some aspects of parents’ views on parenting (such as respecting children’s views and opinions) transcended social class boundaries (with both working class and middle class parents pinpointing this as important) and others cannot be explained in purely class terms. Consideration also has to be given to where their children were placed within the life course and also the presence or absence of older siblings. For instance, although Anthony and Clare were working class and seemingly more intent on upholding a stronger adult-child boundary (which has been linked to working class parenting styles), they also had young children aged eight. In contrast, the middle class parents who seemed to have a more liberal attitude to parenting (such as Mike and Allison, Pam and Malcolm, and Janet and David) also had an older child or adult twins. ‘Age’, as we will see, can be significant in terms of the amount of decision-making power children are accorded. There is also some suggestion in the narratives of the parents that they may sacrifice some of their parental roles when older siblings are on hand to reason with their children.

Parents’ mission statements Reflecting messages conveyed through twin parenting guides and broader cultural expectations of how children should grow up, at the heart of the parents’ philosophies for bringing up their twins lay a concern to treat their children as ‘individuals’. For example, Mike explained that he and his wife had always ‘tried to keep them as individuals’ and, similarly, Pam told me that her adult twins ‘were tret as individuals all the way through’. Ribbens’ (1994) UK study of mothering demonstrated how, as Strathern (1992) has argued,

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individuality constitutes an underlying theme in the socialisation of children. Although some aspects of individuality may be given more significance by some mothers, the cultural valuing of individuality cuts across social class lines. Certainly, this was the case for parents of this study, who all drew my attention to the uniqueness of their children, describing them as different types of people. Parents of twins sometimes drew a distinction between their own twins and other twins to illustrate their children’s uniqueness. According to these parents, ‘twins’ were expected to be ‘permanently and always the same’ (Stuart) and ‘do everything the same way and react the same way’ (Clare). Twins were ‘identical’. ‘Like two out of the same pod’ (Allison). Identical twins were thus positioned as representing all twins, symbolising the very epitome of twinship. Indeed, the overlap between these notions of ‘twinship’ and the parents’ constructions of identical twinship make this especially evident. Identical twins ‘don’t have any individualities’ (Caroline), a sentiment reflected in Jenny’s fear that identical twins would be seen ‘as more of a unit’. Mike said that ‘the beauty of our two is they’re not identical and they have completely different characters really’, implying the lack of such difference in identical twins. As some of these utterances imply, many parents resisted incorporating these ideas of complete sameness into their own definitions of their own twin children. This was the case for parents of identical and non-identical twins. For example, when initially describing her identical twins, Sue told me ‘one is feminine and the other is a tom boy’. Both Caroline and Lindsey described their same-sex non-identical twins as being like ‘chalk and cheese’. Mike and Allison described a variety of differences between their non-identical twins: Mike: Erm … Liam is more academic, sorry Liam is more– Allison: Sociable! … Mike: Yeah [hesitantly]. Allison: Do you think? [Looking to Mike] Mike: Arty and erm … yeah sociable, yeah. More erm … Allison: Outgoing. Mike: [Confirming] Yeah, yeah, more outgoing, Dan’s more … sporty. Perhaps more academic, erm … deeper. Family resemblances were also important resources for helping parents to identify their children as unique individuals. By citing family resemblances, parents not only show how their children are related to them

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and thus how they are woven into the broader family structure, but also how they are different from each other. Marilyn Strathern explores this relationship between kin connections and uniqueness, arguing that it is precisely through their connections with other family members that children are constituted as individuals: While the child claims its origins in its parents’ make-up, it itself evinces a unique combination of characteristics, and the combination is a matter of chance. This lays the basis for its individuality (Strathern, 1992: 166). Given the importance attached to inheritance and descent as a foundation for uniqueness within Western societies, it is no surprise that the desire to form connections of inheritance is not particular to parents of twins. In her study Mothering the Self, Lawler (2000) also found that mothers of singleton children were actively involved in constituting their children as unique individuals by identifying them as containing some traits of their relatives. Similarly, for many of the parents in this study, this chance combination of genetic characteristics was seen to result in their twins having more of one parent than the other and thus in their twins being different from one another. For instance, Caroline attributed Charlotte and Hannah to different sides of the family, Charlotte being on her dad’s side and Hannah on her mum’s. Similarly, Mike and Allison explained that whilst Dan was more like his dad, Liam was more like his mum: Allison: [Dan’s] very much like you. He weighs you up, you know before he gets to know you. Kate: Yeah. Allison: Whereas Liam’ll talk to anybody. And I suppose I do really. Whereas Dan’ll weigh you up. Anthony effectively re-twinned one of his sons, Harry, with himself: Anthony: Harry’s the double of me and my Dad. If I showed you some of the photos of my Dad, you’d say it were our Harry dressed in old clothes. Kate: Oh right. Anthony: Wunt you? Clare: Yeah.

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Anthony: Cos me, my Dad and our Harry are like peas in a pod. Yet Ash has took after her side. But that’s a good thing really as well. Some of her family is carried on and some of my family is. Certainly, bodily/physical difference was a resource that parents of non-identical twins sometimes exploited to actively construct their children as ‘individuals’. For instance, Caroline (who sometimes named her twins ‘the taller one’ and ‘the smaller one’) literally presented her twins to me, asking them to stand up in front of me so that I could view this difference. Allison went further in her accentuation of difference, arguing that it was difficult to see her sons as ‘twins’ at all: Allison: I suppose I never think of them as twins. Brothers, but not as a twin. I don’t know why. Whether or not it’s because they don’t look alike at all, they don’t act the same at all. You know, one’s dark, the other’s quite fair. I just think of them as, as two brothers really, not a twin. Because they are so different, Allison redefines her twins as two different-looking brothers rather than as one (same-looking) twin unit. Even parents of different-sex twins do not take this aspect of difference for granted. Jenny, mother of three-year-old different-sex twins, said that her twins were ‘very different in looks and in temperament as well’; similarly, Janet explained that ‘Olivia had a much rounder face than Adam’. The body therefore takes on significance precisely because it is an effective marker of distinctiveness and can serve to distance their twins from other (identical) twins. Personality and character differences took on added force for parents of identical twins, who had to assert their children’s individuality quite literally in the face of sameness. Thus, during the introductory meeting, mum Sue told me ‘whilst [Ruth and Emma] look the same they are very different’. Describing these differences during the interview, dad Stuart explained that Emma was ‘not afraid to talk back’ and ‘stands her ground’, whilst Sue said that Ruth was ‘more reserved’. Sue then condensed and simplified this distinction through applying character labels to each twin: ‘Soppy Ruth’ was thus compared with her sister, ‘Miss hard as nails’. Such simplifying strategies help to crystallise distinctions between twins and, in this example, serve to assert the individuality of those very twins who, through their embodiment of physical sameness, are at most risk of being cast off as ‘failed’ individuals. In line with this, some psychological research has also

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indicated that identical twins are often described as different by their parents, with some parents exaggerating these differences (Allen et al., 1976; Allen et al., 1971). Alongside and related to this valuing of uniqueness, the parents I spoke to also drew attention to the importance of encouraging independence and autonomy in children. As Ribbens (1994: 54) notes, these ideals have come to define what counts as caring for children. For the parents in this study, this gradual progression towards independence was considered to be a natural part of ‘growing up’, but also something which parents should actively encourage. We have already seen glimpses of parents’ valuing of these goals. Earlier we heard Allison explain that there comes a time when you have to let your children go, while Pam and Malcolm spoke of letting their children make their own mistakes and Janet saw children (in general) as having to eventually leave the family to face the big (‘adult’) world. Parents thought that their twins would have to both grow independent of them as parents and independent of each other too. Speaking of the former, Clare and Anthony told me: Clare: Cos you say, ‘sixteenth birthday, blow candles off o’ cake’ and that’s it. Anthony: ‘You’re gone!’ Clare: ‘You’re out!’ Within Western ‘normative timetables’1 (Finch, 1987: 163) of growing up, movement away from the family home marks the passage to adulthood (Allan and Crow, 2001). Children who have ‘moved out’ but not achieved independence from their parents may be regarded as slightly problematic. In their questionnaires, Cheryl and Jonathan both described their adult twin daughter Anne (who lives away from home) as being very dependent on dad Jonathan for emotional and practical support. Jonathan wrote: Anne believes that each hurdle she comes across can be smoothed out by Dad – and it usually is. When she went to Portugal for a 3 month placement as part of her nursing course – Dad had to write to her every day. She rang home once a week and opened her news with ‘where’s dad – is he working – has he been in pub – how is he?’ […] Anne has now left home but rings every day and usually wants something – more than likely a lift in the car. She’s very disorganised – opposite to Brian who has caused us very little problems, if any.

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The tone of Jonathan’s comments (his reference to himself in the third person, the words he underlines, his implication that Anne uses her dad as a taxi service and his final comment about Brian being less problematic) suggests that this dependence is too strong. Child twins also have to grow independent of each other. As Pam explained: I know you’re twins and I know you’ve got this bond between you and all the rest of it, but I do think you’re individuals at the end of the day. It is good to mix with different people. If you’re together all the way through, and you’ve got one circle of friends that you both share, I don’t think it’s healthy, not for relationships. I mean at some point, you’re going to have to go your own separate way in life, you’re going to get married and you’re going to have your own families. So you know, the sooner you sort of get used to leading your own way of life. Because obviously the longer it goes on you’re together, the further down the line it gets, it’ll be harder to make that split. The ‘special’ bond that twins are said to have, and which Pam relates to me here, makes twins (compared to siblings) more at risk of not ‘making the split’. In line with this and the normative life course timetable that underpins this view, it was, on the whole, the parents of the older child twins who drew more attention to their children actually being independent of each other and thus to the fact that they were, in this regard, growing up successfully. For instance, Sue explained that her children Ruth and Emma were following different career paths, had different friends and liked their own space. Caroline told me that Charlotte and Hannah had different friends and never arranged to go anywhere together. Mike told me that his twins were ‘both pretty independent’, had chosen to go to different universities and had some different friends. Cheryl and Jonathan explained that their twins had very different lives. Anne lived away from home with her partner and son and Brian lived at home, studied at university and intended to tour Australia. Rather than being dependent on each other, Anne relied more on her dad and Brian on himself, being described as a ‘loner’ by his mum Cheryl. Only Janet and David stood out as parents of older children who characterised their children as mutually interdependent and in need of each other. David explained that Adam relied on Olivia to help him out with his homework and both parents repeatedly told me

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that their twins missed each other when they spent time apart. David explained how Olivia would always think about Adam when she was out present-buying with the rest of her family. Although it was common for the other parents to explain how their children’s relationship had changed over time with regard to their children growing in independence, Janet explained that their twins’ closeness had remained constant over time: ‘I think it’s gone on as it started.’ When asked to explain their twins’ relationship, David told me: Well they love each other [laughs]. They would be very unhappy if they hadn’t got each other now. Although she gets cross with Adam, I think they would be lost wouldn’t they? Reflecting her belief that the role of the family was to provide its members with the most significant supportive mutual relationships, Janet told me that all their children liked being together: ‘it’s really joyous because they all enjoy each other’s company.’ As such, the significance these parents accord to their twins’ relationship may also be another expression of this broader family ethos. Notwithstanding this, Janet was also keen to make sure that their children were not portrayed as ‘overly-reliant’: […] when they do get on it’s really nice to see. But I think it’s a good thing that they don’t actually rely on each other to such an extent that they have to really cling on. You know, they can go off for their various days out without the other one, although the other one might miss, but erm … It would be terrible if they depended so much on each other, they couldn’t do anything. Asserting her commitment to the goal of independence, Janet thus affirms that whilst her children are close, they are not so close that they are unable to effectively function as independent individuals. Parents of the youngest twins in the study placed most emphasis on their children spending time together. Clare and Anthony, parents of the youngest twins Ash and Harry, recounted how their eight-year-olds sometimes bunked up together, slept top-to-tail (head-to-toe) with each other and played on the Playstation together. They explained: Clare: But they do like, they enjoy one another’s company don’t they?

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Anthony: Yeah cos they miss each other don’t they, like you said, when one’s at our Keith’s, they’re asking ‘when’s Ash coming back?’ ‘when’s’– Characterised as a period of dependency and lack of personhood, childhood offers young twins the opportunity to be physically together (and to be ‘twins’ in this sense) without being stigmatised as failed individuals. However, this does not mean that they sacrifice their commitment to the goal of independence. Clare and Anthony were also slightly concerned that Ash was growing too dependent on Harry for friendship and companionship: Clare: [Ash] tends to hang on to … to our Harry. Cos he’ll come home and you never hear our Harry say, ‘I’ve got no friends at school’ but you’ll hear our Ash say it won’t you? Thus, whilst over-reliance was a concern for Anthony and Clare because of Ash’s dependency on his brother, for Janet, it was something which both her children had avoided. Therefore, parents asserted their child’s independence to different extents, parents of older children placing more emphasis on this. However, in line with both broader cultural understandings of how children should ‘grow up’ and the advice portrayed in twin parenting guides, all the parents did express a desire to help their children become unique and independent ‘individuals’. Indeed, the force with which some parents distanced their own twins from stereotypes of twinship suggests that they were especially concerned to uphold these values precisely because dominant social expectations of twins serve to undermine them. In this sense, then, parents might provide an enabling context for twins to construct themselves as ‘individuals’. However, as we will now see, these philosophies do not necessarily always form the basis for the more everyday decisions they make about their own twins.

Parenting practices: making decisions All the parents of twins were asked to explain their views and attitudes regarding the decisions they had made about dressing their twins, placing their twins in classes at school, naming their twins and organising bedroom space. These key issues occupy a central place in twin parenting guides and are important mediums through which parents may shape the ways in which public onlookers and twins themselves define their

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identities. As such, they constitute key dimensions of parenting practice, that is, how parenting is carried out and ‘done’ in everyday life.2 Parents were asked to consider if anything would or had changed over time. The parents that were interviewed each gave their accounts from particular standpoints. For instance, whilst some had very young child twins and were contemplating the decisions they would be making in the future, others were the parents of adult twins and were speaking retrospectively about the decisions they had already made. Dress Dress, here discussed in terms of clothes, constitutes an important ‘resource’ used by parents and twins to construct identity. As a cultural tool, it contributes to bringing meaning to the body (Warwick and Cavallaro, 1998), helping to signify and display our sense of belonging and distinction (Barnes and Eicher, 1992). The importance of dress has long been recognised in psychological studies of twins, where such parental decisions are explored with a view to examining the impact of ‘environmental factors’ on twins’ personality development, behaviour and the ‘twin relationship’. Many studies have found that identical twins (Koch, 1966) and same-sex non-identical twins are more likely to be dressed alike than different-sex twins (Cohen et al., 1975; Robin et al., 1994). Social class has also been found to have some bearing on parents’ attitudes towards dress, with parents from higher social classes being more likely to have differentiating principles about dress (Robin et al., 1994) and parents from lower social classes being more likely to dress their twins alike (Matheny et al., 1976). Although parents emphasised the importance of treating their children as unique ‘individuals’, most explained that at various points, they (commonly the mother) had chosen to dress their children in identical or similar clothes. Again, this transcended social class boundaries, suggesting that cultural expectations of how twins should ‘look’ are deeply embedded. Hence, Allison (a middle class mother) and Clare and Caroline (both working class mothers) had dressed their same-sex non-identical twins in identical clothes as babies and (for Clare and Caroline) as children as well. Some parents highlighted how this compromised their ‘mission’ to assert individuality on behalf of their children. Commenting on his wife’s decision to dress their children in identical clothes, Anthony argued: Well they’re individuals aren’t they? They shunt really have [the] same, you know, why try and make ’em same?

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For Anthony, such parenting practices were inappropriate because they presented his children as if they were not individuals at all. Clare seemed aware of this: ‘I suppose that’s not giving them, they’re not individuals.’ However, at eight years old, her sons Ash and Harry were still dressed in identical clothes, highlighting the decision-making power invested in the mother. Sue, a working class mother of identical-looking twins, and Pam, a middle class mother of adult identical twins, both explained how they had dressed their children in different coloured outfits (albeit of the same type). Pam told me she chose different colours to ‘give them their own identity’. The beginning of this individuality is therefore actively ‘achieved’ through dressing their children in different coloured identically-styled clothes. Parents of different-sex-twins also said that they had dressed their children in similar clothes. For instance, Jonathan told me, ‘we did […] dress them alike up to about the age of 2½ yrs’. Similarly Janet, a middle class mother, said: … when they were really tiny […] they had some snowmen sleeping suits which, if one had one […] I had to buy the other one because they were both so nice. Whilst Jenny also explained that she had dressed her different-sex twins in gender-stereotyped colours (thereby signalling the sex differences that may not be directly obvious), this practice was not always undertaken: ‘I liked to see them dressed in the same things, or sometimes have one in pink and one in blue.’ Indeed, she implied that, in contrast to toddler clothes, baby clothes could be interchangeable: ‘I would never consciously consider their clothes interchangeable [now as toddlers]. We’ve got past that stage I think.’ The developmental model of child ‘growth’ is obvious here, both in the language used (mention of ‘stages’) and in the story being told; babies are non-persons who develop into (more distinct) gendered ‘persons in the making’. As Ribbens (1994: 56) notes, ‘there is a common tendency for babies to be described as not quite “human”’. In babyhood, therefore, expressions of gender difference do not necessarily have to be communicated by parents. In these instances, expressions of ‘twin identity’ can override gender differences. This is further implied by the iconography of ‘new baby’ greetings cards for parents of twins which, in contrast to singleton babies, make little if any mention of the sex of the babies, preferring to focus on congratulating parents on the birth of their ‘twins’.

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When children became toddlers, gender became too physically evident to be ignored. Parents emphasised that gender difference had to be acknowledged. Janet said that ‘you can’t dress them the same anyway because they are a boy and a girl’. Individuality, so it seems, has materialised through the very physicality of the body. This is why, to paraphrase Jenny, it is obvious that ‘you can’t put them in the same outfits’. In this sense, then, adult mothers ‘act as purveyors of culture by providing gender-symbolic dress that encourages others to attribute masculine or feminine gender and to act on the basis of these attributions when interacting with the child’ (Eicher and Roach-Higgins, 1992: 17). However, this does not mean that expressions of sameness are completely abandoned: Jenny: As they got to be toddlers, I used to go to Safeways down the road. They have a good range of toddler clothes. I could spend a fortune there. They tended to have boy and girl versions of the same thing. Like they would have orange cord dungarees and an orange cord sort of pinafore dress. Jenny modifies expressions of sameness and instead presents her children as two ‘similar’ peas out of ‘the same pod’. By dressing them in the same style and colour of clothing, she symbolically connects them to each other and thus actively marks them out as one dyadic unit. Alongside this, the ‘pinafore dress’ and ‘dungarees’ serve to signal gender differences. In summary, then, the parents in this study, some middle class, some working class, tended to dress their twins alike when they were children, but the extent of sameness and the particular expression of this depended on how far the physicality of their twins’ bodies could communicate some sense of their potential individuality. This was especially important in relation to gender distinctions. Same-sex nonidentical twins may remain dressed in identical outfits in childhood because there is no sex difference to signal through gendered clothing. No compromise has to be made; these twins can be dressed as twins whilst still being dressed as boys or girls. In contrast, this period of identicalness may be cut short for different-sex twins, whose ‘emergent’ gendered identities are seen to demand acknowledgement past babyhood. However, the ‘ideal’ of twin sameness may be modified rather than abandoned. Being most at risk of conveying a lack of potential for individuality, identical twins are dressed in different coloured outfits to ‘create’ some expression of uniqueness amidst sameness.

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However, why do most parents initially choose to dress their young children in similar or identical outfits and do they envisage a time when their children will dress differently? Many mothers emphasised the practical basis of their decisions to dress their twins in identical or similar clothes. Allison told me it was easier to buy two at the same time ‘because it was too hard work to start traipsing around the shops’, while Jenny told me that ‘it was an awful lot easier to keep an eye on the pair of them outside because they were both wearing the same things’. However, notwithstanding these points, some still said that they liked to see their children looking similar to each other. For example, Jenny reluctantly said, ‘I suppose I liked to see them in the same things’ and likewise Clare told me, ‘I just like to see ’em in [the] same clothes’. Indeed, there is a great deal of ‘social capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986) to be gained from publicly presenting child twins in identical or very similar clothes. Parents may gain access to a variety of different social contacts or opportunities for social interaction. In her UK study of parents of twins and higher multiples, Preedy (1999) found that some parents felt that the ‘cuteness’ associated with multiples increased the attention others gave to them. Similarly, many of the parents I spoke to explained how passers-by would often stop them in the street and ask them questions about their children: Jenny: ‘Ooo are they twins?’ they say. I say, ‘yeah’. ‘Are they identical?’ […] They’re fine. I like it. I mean when they were babies they got lots of nice comments. Anthony: When they were babies, obviously you’ve got two and you can see they’re [the] same age. You used to get people saying, ‘oh I’d have loved to have had twins’. Allison: Yeah I suppose if we were out, people would maybe ask if they were twins, won’t they? [To her husband Mike] Because they were dressed the same. Parents may spend time and money preparing their children for public presentation: Malcolm: We actually, well you actually spent a lot of money on clothes to make them look nice. […] Pam always liked to have them looking pretty. And they did. They looked gorgeous. And everywhere we went we always got good comments about them. And of course people are curious. They’ve got curiosity when they see twins when

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they’re dressed nice and they look identical. People are very curious and they want to look at it. Being recognised as twins, these children attract welcome attention to their parents. As Jenny put it, ‘you feel as if you get a lot of special notice taken of you’. Indeed, like Jenny, many parents said they felt ‘special’. Clare said, ‘I think we’re privileged to have twins’ and similarly Malcolm said, ‘we’re lucky to have something special’. These feelings of ‘specialness’ simultaneously set them apart from other parents whilst reaffirming their identification with fellow parents of twins: Jenny: […] You do bump into lots of other people with twins when you’re out. It’s like there’s some special bond there […] It’s nice. Parents of twins may be treated as special because, unlike the majority of other people, they have managed to produce two children at once. This is expressed through jokes about the father’s increased fertility and comments about the ‘cleverness’ of parents forming two rather than one. In my study, Malcolm spoke of the reactions he got from some of his work colleagues: ‘oh they were real happy – slapping me on the back and shaking my hand and congratulating me.’ Jonathan told me that everyone said ‘buy you a pint!’ or ‘knew you had it in you!’. Allison also explained the reaction she got from the wife of a surgeon: Allison: His wife said to me, ‘did you think that you were somebody special when you’d had twins and you were very clever?’. I said, ‘oh no’. She said, ‘oh you want to think that cos–’ […] ‘How clever, you know, to have, for your body to have two in one go.’ Our cultural constructions of twinship provide the lenses through which we come to see and understand what this twoness means and thus how twins are different from other people. Expressions of sameness are permitted when children are young because childhood itself is, as we saw in Chapter 2, defined as a period of training and becoming. Firmly positioned within this institution, these children are socially endorsed (by adults), indeed encouraged, to temporarily discard the pursuit of physical expressions of individuality in favour of being ‘twins’. Drawing on Bourdieu, we can say that identical-looking young child bodies therefore constitute a form of ‘physical capital’, that is, they have bodies that possess symbolic value and that can be used to gain other kinds of capital, such as symbolic capital (social status) and

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social capital (broader social networks) (Shilling, 2003: 111). By dressing their twins in identical or similar clothes, parents map cultural meanings of twinship onto their children’s bodies, train others how to ‘see’ them and encourage a (positive) response. However, parents did see a time when this expression of sameness would stop. Clare, the mother of eight-year-old twins, told me: Clare: I just like to see ’em in [the] same clothes. I suppose as they get older they will change. For most parents, this transition from sameness to difference only came/ would come when their children’s emergent individualities demanded greater expression through dress and/or when children actively objected to being dressed the same. For instance, even though Allison had dressed her twins the same as babies, she explained that she chose to dress them differently later on because ‘they were individuals’. Caroline explained that she allowed her children to choose what they wore because the items she was choosing were not finding favour with her children. Similarly, Clare said, ‘until they say, “oh I’m not wearing what he’s wearing” I’ll continue to do it’. Implicit in this statement is the assumption that, at present, her children are too young to have opinions, an assumption that was given more explicit voicing by Jenny: Jenny: When they’re older, they’ll be able to make more choices about what they want to wear. I would never ever say, ‘oh you’re wearing this’ or try to dress them the same if they weren’t interested. However, in choosing to dress their children the same, Jenny and Clare both assume that their children would ‘be interested’ or would have agreed with their choice. Children often only opt out of this ‘agreement’ and this active objection can only take place when their children are considered old enough or, to be more accurate, competent enough to make their own choices and act as autonomous individuals. These narratives thus reveal parents’ developmental understandings of children as both growing in individuality and growing in competence. Thus far, it is clear that parents have a role to play in shaping one important signifier of identity: dress. As external others, parents impress particular versions of identity onto their children’s bodies and, through such actions, potentially shape other people’s attitudes towards their children. Parents therefore have an important role to play in the

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‘internal-external dialectic’ ( Jenkins, 2004: 49) of identity construction. Since young children who look like twins may be a source of social capital, parental ‘missions’ to emphasise uniqueness may be overridden by a concern to emphasise ‘twin’ identity. Through dressing their twins in similar or the same clothes, parents of young twins play up their children’s ‘twin’ identity to varying degrees and, through these actions, reproduce and modify cultural constructions of twinship. The story changes, however, as children get older and, in line with a normative life course timetable, are expected to be moving towards adulthood and thus to be emerging as unique individuals. Reflecting developmental understandings of child competence, these children are now given more opportunity to choose their own clothes. In this sense, older children may have a greater degree of agency in presenting their own selves and also in renegotiating the identities that have already been initially drawn up by their parents. This part of the story is taken up in the following chapter. Bedrooms Bedroom space constitutes an important finite household resource that can be used by children to construct and negotiate their identities (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2002). The ways in which parents allocate bedrooms, together with the ways in which they ‘create’ and define this physical space, structure the context within which this process takes place. All of the parents had originally decided to place their twin babies together in one room. Most said that they did not have enough space to place them in different rooms; however, this reflected the significance they attributed to distinctions of birth order, age and gender. Twins with older siblings had to fit in around their already resident brother(s) and/or sisters(s). Thus, Ruth and Emma were placed in a different room from their older brother John, and Andrea and Rebecca were placed apart from their older brother Jeremy. Such decisions could thus reveal the value (and privileges) attributed to the firstborn child and/or point towards the parents’ reluctance to ‘disturb’ social hierarchies of age when the new twins were born. Certainly, fears that the firstborn’s ‘development’ may be negatively affected by the birth of the second born sibling(s) (for example, through expressions of jealousy and conflict) are well documented in the psychological literature (see Dunn, 2000; Dunn et al., 1981) and form part of our cultural understanding of the significance of birth order. Related to this, some parents decided to keep their twins apart from their fellow siblings due to the age differences between them. This was

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the case for Caroline, who explained that she had placed her twins in a different room from her younger daughter ‘because of the age gap’. Parents held two slightly different conceptualisations of age. Age was frequently conceptualised in developmental terms. For example, Mike said that twins were ‘easier than having […] one and then another say two years older because they’re then at different stages’ and Sue explained that her twins ‘go through the same stages together’. Thus, following the Piagetian tradition, age indicates a particular stage of child development and as such positions similarly aged children into one universal category along the progression towards adulthood. In line with this, Caroline suggested that it was now inappropriate for Charlotte or Hannah to share a room with their younger sister Ellie, because this would mean that ‘boyfriends’ would be in the same room as ‘dolls’. However, this developmental model of ‘ages and stages’ was sometimes modified through conceptualisations of how different generations of children had different interests and tastes. Thus, Mike also said that ‘each age group has things that are the hip things doesn’t it’ and, similarly, Anthony said that if his twins Ash and Harry had an older sibling, ‘there’d be differences in what their tastes are […] and their interests’. These notions of age therefore run alongside notions of birth order so that twins, being born at the same time, are of the same age and have the same interests. This lies in contrast to other singleton siblings who, following the same logic of argument, will be of different ages, have different interests and have different positions within the birth order hierarchy. Therefore, notions of age not only differentiate between particular children within the category ‘children’ but, importantly, in doing so also draw out distinctions between singleton children and twin children. In locating twins in different rooms from their older or younger siblings, parents give physical expression to the classificatory distinction between siblings and twins and thus communicate and map out these lines of commonality and difference. We therefore see how the organisation of space may emerge from social relations (Massey, 1994). However, through actively constituting twin togetherness, parents place their twins within a spatial environment that reflects one key defining feature of twinship and quite literally makes room for their children to embody twin togetherness and be ‘twins’. We thus also see the potential for space to shape social relations (Massey, 1994). Just how far parents were willing to provide space for their children to be ‘twins’ also depended, however, upon where their twins were situated within the life course and, related to this, the extent to which parents

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thought it necessary to provide space for them as ‘individuals’. Child twins were always kept together regardless of whether there was ‘space’ for them to be placed in two different rooms. This reflects Preedy’s findings that ‘multiples shared a bedroom even if there were opportunities to sleep separately’ (1999: 84). For the parents I spoke with, this expression of togetherness was seen to be an important part of twin childhood and something that should not be interfered with. For example, Jenny said that ‘they seem to enjoy being together. We haven’t actually thought about giving them separate bedrooms’. Although Jenny encourages her children to be independent of each other in other aspects of their lives (‘Louise will go out for a trip with daddy to the supermarket and Dom will stay with me, out in the garden’), she reserves the bedroom as a space for her twins to enjoy being together. Importantly, this was often conceptualised by parents as a ‘shared’ space, implying joint ownership and the absence of a clear-cut distinction between the two twins. Some parents helped to define this space as a shared space by locating ‘shared’ objects within it. Hence, Sue bought her twins one TV because it was impractical to place two in the one room. However, parents did acknowledge or activate their desire to encourage independence by ‘splitting their children up’ and placing them in ‘separate’ rooms when they were older. Indeed, just as parents expected difference to replace similarity and sameness, so independence and apartness were expected to replace this expression of togetherness. In part, the ability to actually achieve this ideal depends on the financial ability of parents to purchase a house where each of their children can have their own rooms. Nevertheless, the separate ‘single’ room, as we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 5, is ‘not only a private spatial sphere, made possible by increasing family affluence: it is also a private symbolic sphere, underlining the child’s position as an individual and a personality’ (Frones, 1994: 154). Far from being restricted to parents of twins, the increasing importance attributed to the single room reflects broader trends within Europe, where it is common for young people to have their own bedrooms. In their cross-national study, Bovill and Livingstone (2001: 2) found that whilst just over half of six- to seven-year-olds across five European countries did not have to share a room, this figure increased for older children, with two-thirds of nine- to ten-year-olds, three-quarters of 12- to 13-year-olds and over 80 per cent of 15- to 16-year-olds having their own bedrooms. Although she did not have the space to accommodate splitting her 13-year-old twins up, Sue said that ‘I’d separate them if I could’.

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Having the space available to do so, Mike explained how he ‘split their rooms up’ in order ‘to give them some space to be able to do their studies’. Even Jenny, whose children were presently together in one room, foresaw a time in the future when her children would ‘want’ ‘separate’ rooms: ‘I think certainly by the time they’re nine or ten, they’ll probably want to have separate bedrooms anyway.’ Implicit is the suggestion that twins naturally progress from togetherness to apartness; increasing age brings the desire for separation. Jenny’s comments further highlight how children are seen to ‘grow out’ of some aspects of twinship. Indeed, as Mike explained, ‘life’s not going to continue with [them] together’. Certainly, life is not supposed to continue with twins sharing a room; on the contrary, twins are expected to move into ‘separate’ rooms so that they can be re-twinned with a romantic partner and share a room with them instead. Fears of incest may mean that different-sex twins are especially expected to move into separate rooms. As Sue explained when describing her own children, adolescence is characterised as a period of life governed by the controlling power of ‘hormones’. Different-sex twins, who are already part of a different-sex partnership, may be considered to have the potential to realise what is sometimes seen to be a ‘natural’ expression of sexuality. Those who stay together for too long may thus become a source of ridicule and social stigma. Still sharing a room with her brother at age 16, Olivia identified the social unease this created: Our friends laugh and get really weird when we say we share a room. Olivia’s father, David, recognised the social ‘appropriateness’ of differentsex twins being apart: More significantly, wasn’t it that we thought Olivia ought to go into her own room and she couldn’t sleep so she had to come back in her big room. Although David and his wife Janet made attempts at ‘splitting’ their twin children up, in order to ensure Olivia could sleep properly, they decided to place them back together again. Parents’ decisions about allocating rooms communicate messages of identity by signalling differences between siblings and twins, the significance of gender and life course positions. Importantly, in placing

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their twins together or apart, parents provide their children with various spatial contexts within and through which to negotiate their identities. In deciding who is present and absent from the bedroom space, parents give their twins varying degrees of ‘immediate’ access to their fellow twins and siblings and present them with different ‘human resources’ that can be used during social interaction to construct identity within this particular space. Chapter 5 therefore examines how twins utilise each other to map out their identities within their bedroom space. Alongside this, parents also shape the physical landscape of this environment. On a mundane level, parents provide their children with vital elements of bedroom furniture such as beds, wardrobes and shelves, all of which, as we will see in Chapter 5, may be drawn upon by twins and used as props to negotiate identity. Classes Children spend a large part of their time at school. Being the same age, twins are likely to enter the school setting at the same time and, depending on school policy and the size of the school, parents may or may not be given the opportunity to place them together or apart. UK research conducted in association with TAMBA (Fraser, 2009) suggests that around 20 per cent of schools with two or more entry classes do not give parents the opportunity to have an input into the school’s decision to separate the twins or keep them together. However, the majority of multiples initially stay together, largely because schools only have one class per year group to place them into. Some parents I spoke with did not yet have to activate decisions about their children’s schooling. Lindsey had only just successfully adopted her four-year-old twins and Jenny had three-year-old twins who were not yet old enough to attend primary school. Of the other parents, only Pam and Malcolm made it clear that they had been consulted about whether or not their children should be together or apart in primary school. Clare and Anthony explained that their children entered a one-form entry school and, as such, were automatically placed into the same class. Mike and Allison, Sue and Stuart, and Caroline said that their twins began school in the same classes (until they actively objected later on). All the twins I spoke with had originally spent some time in the same class at primary school. Some of the parents said that they initially wanted to place their children together in primary school. This was the case for Jenny, Pam and Malcolm, and Janet and David. Indeed, reflecting the earlier conclusions relating to parents’ decisions about

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bedrooms, some implied that this was a natural state of twin childhood and, as such, was something that should not be obstructed: Pam: I said ‘don’t split them, let them decide’ because obviously at that stage, you don’t know how they’re going to develop. And I think for starting school, up to that point, they’d always been together and I didn’t want to make the decision to split them at that early stage because it might have affected them, you know, through their school. I asked Jenny why she would ideally like her twins to stay together: Jenny: […] The only reason I can think of is that they’ve always been together. Ok, they’ve not been together in the same room doing the same things all of the time, but to start not seeing each other for most of the day, five days a week, is a big step really isn’t it? Since twins have ‘always been together’, this is presented as a natural state of twinship and set in opposition to the unnatural (dysfunctional) effects that could be caused by ‘separation’. Interestingly, despite their desires to place their twins together, both Jenny and Pam explained that if their children had different levels of academic ability, this could be a reason for them being placed into separate classes. Jenny said that in reality, her twins may have to enter school at different intake times because Dom had difficulty with his speech: Jenny: […] Louise may well end up going before Dom. While on one hand I feel it’s not desirable because it might make Dom feel inadequate, we can’t hold Louise back because of Dom. And I wouldn’t want him to feel that he was holding her back either. Which could be as bad as feeling that he was inferior in some way. Pam explained how she had managed to avoid having to place her children into separate classes because they always remained at the same academic level of ability and demonstrated their independence from each other: Pam: […] as they progressed and you go to parent’s evenings, they were always, always on a par with each other. One was never you know, more clever than the other. They were always on a par weren’t

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they? So they were always kept on the same sort of grade right through school, and they made their own circle of friends, so there wasn’t that problem that they were together at home, they were together at school and never apart. There was never that. They went their own way once they got to school. One would go off to their circle of friends and the other one the other way. Unlike Pam, some parents openly questioned the fact that their children were currently in the same class or had actively taken steps to remove their children from being in the same class. Although Lindsey was just about to adopt her twins, and thus had not yet made any practical decisions about their schooling, she told me that even though her twins were currently in the same class, ‘this is something they need to move away from’. As such, she intended to tell the teachers that, in group work, she would prefer them to be in different teams. When explaining why they would prefer their twins to be in different classes, Anthony and Clare outlined some of the potential opportunities that this ‘separation’ could offer: Clare: […] They’d probably be doing different things and have different interests. Erm … I think that’s about it. But so they wouldn’t be in each other’s company for 24–7. That type of thing. So they’d have space and be able to develop theirselves as individual. Anthony: So [Ash] can develop his own friends, do you know what I mean? That’s probably my theory behind – I’d like ’em in different classes. They can develop their own group of friends. As we saw in the previous discussion of bedrooms, this separation is seen to offer child twins the space to develop as individuals. They can develop as distinct persons by developing different interests and mixing with different friendship groups. Alongside this, they can develop their capacity for independence by experiencing being without each other. Other parents had already actively taken steps to remove their children from being in the same class: Sue moved Emma and Ruth into different classes because they were always placed on the same tables and weren’t making friends, whilst Caroline opted for different classes because the ‘smaller twin’ was ‘always following the bigger one around’. Too much physical togetherness is therefore deemed to be suffocating and efforts are made to moderate this to ensure that twins do not lose their capacity for independence. Thus mirroring other research conducted with parents and teachers in the USA (Segal and Russell, 1992), Australia

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(Gleeson et al., 1990) and the UK (Preedy, 1999), the main reasons given for separating twins or wanting to separate them were linked to notions of helping them to develop individuality and independence. Reflecting Pam and Jenny’s earlier sentiments, some twins were also removed from this sate of togetherness if their academic achievements were diverging. Behind this decision lay concerns to both avoid placing twins in competition with each other and defining one twin as ‘better’ than the other. Thus, Mike explained how he had put his children in different classes because the teachers ‘put them against each other’ and his wife Allison told me that they did not want either twin to feel inferior: Allison: But I think to begin with, when they started school, they were in the same class while we went in, dint they? And Liam was always, ’cos Daniel was a little bit brighter and Liam always seemed to be in Daniel’s shadow. Similarly, Mike said: Mike: We got them put in different classes. I mean there’s something different about being beaten by your brother, than there is to being beaten fairly and squarely by– Allison: Somebody else. In line with these narratives, a UK national survey (Fraser, 2009: 31) found that parents of multiples often identified unhealthy competition and teachers confusing or comparing their children as disadvantages to multiples being educated in the same class. In my study, parents wanted their children to see themselves as equal individuals rather than interpret these differences as evidence of superiority or inferiority. Indeed, parents that compared their children and positioned them hierarchically according to their achievements sometimes expressed remorse at this practice: Clare: I know sometimes that we do, we do compare them to one another don’t we? Anthony: Hmm. Clare: And I know that we get cross with one another don’t we? Anthony: Mmm. Clare: ‘Oh you should be doing this’ ‘Harry’s- You should be doing-’ … ‘Look what Ash can do’ and we think, that’s not right because – Anthony: They’re individuals.

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Clare: [Continuing] Everybody’s got a weakness and everybody excels at something, and so, we try, don’t we? [To Anthony] We try not to do it. Encouraging twins to be equally different rather than differently equal is here presented as ‘good’ parenting practice. Parents should respect their children as unique persons, without judging them and showing preference for one over the other. There should be no favouritism. This sentiment is reflected in the keenness of parents to stress how they do treat their children equally. As Jonathan wrote, ‘I’ve purposely ensured that equal time/money/love (not necessarily in that order) have been given to my children’; similarly, Mike said that ‘we’re always conscious of making sure, if we spend some money on one, we spend the same amount on the other’. Whilst the appropriateness of fostering this equality reflects cultural knowledge transported through the ‘expert systems’ (Giddens, 1991: 18) of twin parenting guides, this also has to be seen as reflecting the wider cultural valuing of the ‘individual’. Within Western society, the individual is a person with individual rights who, through the process of individuation, also becomes an individuated citizen entitled to equal treatment in terms of health, welfare and education (Turner, 1986). Parents of twins may therefore be no different from other parents in wanting to present their children as equals. Indeed, research suggests that this is the case (Allatt and Yeandle, 1986; Finch and Mason, 1993). In the UK, when children reach secondary school (aged 11), they commonly enter year groups with more than one class per subject. Often, during the initial few years, all children will take a core body of subjects. Parents may therefore once again consider whether or not their twins should be together or apart. Pam and Janet wanted to keep their twins together. Only Pam made a point of telling me that the school had given her a choice about whether to keep her twins in the same or different classes: Kate: What happened when they went to comprehensive school? Pam: Same thing then. When we went for the initial induction meeting, I was asked if they wanted to be in the same class because as I said, their grades were the same, and I said, ‘well it’s never been a problem so far so just keep them as they are, and if, you know, their work goes different and they need to be split up then-’ but it was never a problem. I think that was because they was individuals in their own right. That was the way they’d been brought up and that

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was the way they reacted. Although there was still that bond and that closeness there when one or the other needed it. More commonly, parents wanted their children to stay in different classes. This was the case for Sue and Stuart, Mike and Allison, and Caroline. Sue and Stuart’s children, Emma and Ruth, like Caroline’s children, Charlotte and Hannah, were in different ‘halves’ of their year groups and were in no classes together at all. Mike and Allison were concerned that their children would compare each other if they were in the same classes. Thus, even though their children were in the same tutor group (where children are gathered together so that registers can be taken), Allison and Mike made sure they were not placed together in the same classes: Mike: We just felt that was very important really because you know, they can be– They’re at a good school. They have to be academically pretty good to be there. But if they’re constantly thinking, ‘I’m not doing as well as my brother’, you know, it’s a bit horrible really. So we stopped that. Certainly, the organisational structures of secondary schools (in the UK) do provide twins with more opportunities to be apart. As Jenny (mother of three-year-old twins) explained: ‘Once they go to secondary school there’ll be different classes for different things anyway. I would have thought.’ After the first few years at secondary school, children are asked to choose the subjects which they want to study for their formal (GCSE) exams. Adam and Olivia had chosen mostly different subjects to study and were in some different classes. Liam and Dan were studying completely different subjects and were therefore in different classes. The significance of the school timetable is central here. Within the school setting, children have their time and space structured by another set of adult rules. Timetables separate out different subjects from one another and map out children’s days, so that they know where they should be and when they should be there. As Jenks (2005: 78) states, ‘[c]lasses may then be regarded as spatial units of activity that are provided with degrees of insulation from one another’. As such, timetables also structure children’s access to different friendship groups and their ability to be apart from each other. The school therefore constitutes an important spatial context within which twins construct and negotiate their identities. The decisions that parents, teachers and other school staff make shape these children’s childhoods by, at the very least, placing them in particular social groupings.

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Through variously activating their desires to foster twin togetherness, encourage independence and treat children equally, parents and schools not only have a role to play in shaping the social circles within which twins move, they also influence the extent to which they are seen to be physically together by others. Although most of the twins had some experience of being in the same class during primary school, commonly they had already been moved into separate classes before they arrived at secondary school. Taken together, the parents’ narratives reflect a conceptualisation of emergent individuality and independence, and thus position each child within a state of becoming. ‘Separation’ is often presented as being both progressive and beneficial; it solves the problem of over-reliance and the resultant lack of opportunity to develop as ‘individuals’. Whilst child twins may be allowed to indulge in physical togetherness when they are young and first start school, this should be moderated if it becomes apparent that children are becoming overly reliant on each other or diverging in their academic abilities. At the time of interviewing, all the older children were in at least some different classes, with many now spending the majority of their school time apart in different classes. This spatial context constitutes another important backdrop against which twins negotiate their identities across the internal-external dialectic of identification. Chapter 5 thus incorporates some exploration of how twins utilise their school environments and the people within them to try to negotiate identity. Naming As children move within the various spaces of their childhoods, parents (amongst others) also present and identify their children in certain ways by ‘naming’ them in particular ways. The power of names in identifying persons and helping us to identify others cannot be overstated. Indeed, as Harré points out, ‘to be a person, is amongst other things, to have a name’ (1998: 65). Here, this notion of ‘naming’ refers to the ways in which people refer to twins. Previous research has often concluded that parents of identical twins (Kozlak, 1978; Ortmeyer, 1970) and parents from the working class (Matheny et al., 1976) are likely to refer to their twins as ‘twins’ and/or use ‘twinsy’ names. My study raised some interesting points in relation to this general link between social class and naming which could provide food for thought, especially for future researchers who may wish to test their broader applicability. In line with their commonly stated desire to treat their children as individuals and the advice given out in twin parenting guides, parents

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of non-identical and identical twins and from strands of both the working class and middle class tended to say that they did not refer to their twins as ‘the twins’. Only David, who was middle class and a parent to different-sex twins, actually said that he called his twins ‘the twins’. There was considerable agreement between parents about the connotations lying behind this particular naming strategy: Janet: Well yes, I suppose I make a point of trying not to say ‘the twins’. I do say ‘Adam and Olivia’ because you shouldn’t put them together and … they are so very very different. They look different. Jenny: […] Other people quite often call them ‘the twins’. But I think there’s a lot less of them being ‘the twins’ than there would be if they were identical. But they are very different in looks and in temperament as well. Naming twins ‘the twins’ joins them together as one dyadic unit and conceals difference. This name is therefore unsuitable for referring to two unique ‘individuals’ because it makes no distinction between each twin. Interestingly, the findings from this study drew attention to the importance of considering when names were used. The twins’ own narratives revealed that this naming strategy was often used by others to talk about them. Jennifer (a non-identical adult twin) told me that ‘on any big family thing we would be referred to as “the twins”’. Similarly, Adam said that his parents ‘may say (when we’re going somewhere) to the person, “oh we’re bringing the twins”’. Indeed, during my time at Adam’s house, I often heard Adam’s brother Craig and his dad David refer to Adam and Olivia as ‘the twins’ when they were talking about them to other family members. Similarly, whilst attending Ellie’s Christmas play, I watched as Ellie’s mother Caroline told another mother that she ‘had twins’ and then later introduced them to her as ‘the twins’. All these twins were different-looking twins. Hence, as the mother speaking with Caroline put it, ‘they don’t look like twins’. This naming strategy therefore marks out and makes visible what might not otherwise be seen. Where non-identical twins are not immediately evident as twins, parents may refer to their twins as ‘twins’ in public. This was the case for David, a middle class father, and Caroline, who was working class. As was the case in relation to dress, then, naming strategies can be seen as another way in which parents play up or play down the significance of twinship. In publicly naming their twins ‘the twins’, they classify them

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within this identity group and thus participate in constructing external perceptions of them as ‘one unit’. The fact that this strategy may be employed in public ‘front-stage’ (Goffman, 1969) interaction suggests once more that there may be social capital to be gained from publicly identifying twins as ‘twins’. Interestingly, there is some evidence to suggest that this naming strategy also helps to mark out twins as ‘children’. Thus, Jennifer (a non-identical adult twin) explained, ‘occasionally I hear either parent referring to us as “the twins” but that is less commonplace in contemporary conversations – more likely if discussing the past’. Indeed, not only is twinship identified with childhood, the naming strategies employed to refer to twins also further reveal the overlap between cultural constructions of twinship and childhood. Naming twins ‘the twins’ serves to conceal individuality in a similar way to naming children ‘the kids’ does. In contrast, personal names offer parents the opportunity to signify difference and distinction. As Strathern (1992: 19) has pointed out, ‘using the first name to personalise the person named seems of a piece with the idea that to treat people as persons one must treat them as unique individuals’. Through the personal name, the individual is marked out as separate and distinct from the Other and thus constructed as an autonomous, self-contained unit. However, there are other senses in which personal names may be less effective in communicating individuality and playing down ‘twin’ identity, for instance, if parents choose rhyming or soundalike names, or if parents confuse names or join names together. Stereotypically, twins are often depicted with similar sounding or rhyming names. Surveys of popular names of twins give mixed conclusions as to how common this trend is. A recent American survey conducted by the Social Security Administration showed that matching initialled names (such as Jacob/Joshua and Ella/Emma) were still common (Social Security Administration, 2008). An Internet survey of the Twinstuff database (an online organisation for twins and parents of twins) showed that whilst same letter names such as these were very popular (nearly one-third of twins had names with the same initial), rhyming twin names and soundalike twin names were much less frequent (Sanders, 2009). Indeed, none of the twins that feature in this study had soundalike or rhyming names. However, some parents did occasionally explain how they sometimes confused names. Sue, mother of identical twins, said that she mixed Ruth and Emma’s names up with her son’s name. Pam and Malcolm, also parents of identical twins, explained how they sometimes found it difficult to put a name to a

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voice when speaking to one of their twins on the telephone. Indeed, if twins look very alike and sound very alike, they may be more at risk from such confusion. But this is not to say that confusing names is simply a matter of physical resemblance. Caroline often confused Charlotte and Ellie’s names, who were not twinned to each other at all. Because names signify and encapsulate individual identity, confusing names blurs the boundaries between one individual and another. Put another way, attributing a person with the wrong name means attributing them with the wrong identity. Thus, by being attributed with her twin’s name, Rebecca temporarily becomes Andrea. A similar blurring of distinction is implied when twins’ names are joined together using the word ‘and’. For instance, Janet preferred to refer to her children as ‘Adam and Olivia’, and Jenny said that her children might be called ‘Dom and Louise’. Jennifer, an adult twin, also said that they were sometimes referred to as ‘Thomas and Jennifer’. Interestingly, although personal names are used, the connotations lying behind this naming strategy may closely resemble those that emerge in relation to calling twins ‘the twins’. Craig, brother to Adam and Olivia, explains: Craig: […] I suppose with a lot of their friends, they’ve grown up as being ‘Adam and Olivia’ and so there’s always been two halves to the whole in a way, with people at school and stuff. […] with some people, the people that have known them for a long time, I think it is quite nice, in a way it’s special that there is the two parts, the parts not really being parts. Erm … you know, there’s double, there’s Adam and Olivia rather than there just being one of them […]. According to Craig, being called ‘Adam and Olivia’ reflects their status as two halves or two parts of one unit. Instead of there just being one of them, there is ‘double’: Adam and Olivia. Here they are constructed as replicas of each other; the unit which they constitute (‘them’) is split in half so that there are two of ‘them’, each half being identical and symbolising the whole. As such, although Adam and Olivia are not explicitly objectified as ‘twins’, they are still constructed as ‘two peas in a pod’, lacking in individuality. These different methods of naming incorporate and signify different meanings and, by emphasising varying degrees of similarity and difference, variously construct twins as one objectified unit, as two parts of one whole, as indistinct and interchangeable or as unique individuals. However, although parents may choose how to refer to their children in different social contexts and play up and play down twin identity

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to varying extents, twins also identify themselves and each other in particular ways and thus participate in constructing their own identities. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 highlight how twins can variously use their bodies, space and talk to negotiate the ways in which they are named and identified by others and also how they think about themselves.

The structuring context of parent-child relations Ideologies of childhood and twinship are mediated through adult power to shape twins’ lives in certain ways. As adult caretakers, mothers in particular take up their roles as chief decision makers and key directors in preparing their young twins for public presentation. Through deciding how to dress and name their twins, place their children in classes and divide up bedroom space, parents (mainly mothers) and, in some situations, teachers train others how to ‘see’ twins and ‘set the stage’ for twins’ negotiations of identity. The decision making power of parents may be relaxed later on, in line with an acknowledgement of the child’s growing competency and appreciation of the child’s emergent individual preferences and opinions. Hence, in line with parents’ developmental understandings of ‘growing up’, older children are commonly thought to be better equipped to make their own decisions and to have more individuality than they did when they were younger. As such, the degree to which parents may feel able to activate children’s choices, respect their opinions and let them have a say in matters which affect their lives may also depend on parents’ own conceptualisations of where their children are placed along the developmental path towards adulthood. Viewed across the life course, it seems that twins are afforded more opportunities to be ‘twins’ when they are younger. Reflecting both cultural understandings of how children grow up and advice given in twin parenting guides, child twins are expected to become independent and autonomous individuals, and parents increasingly incorporate these values into their parenting practices as their children get older or as they show signs that they may not be able to achieve these ideals. Indeed, whilst it does not seem that, in this study, parents from the working class were more likely to treat their twins as ‘twins’ than parents from the middle class, the significance of the life course position and gender of the twins was revealed as important in shaping parenting practice. Thus, although parents may allow their children to look alike as babies and young children and to enjoy their time together as children, such stereotypical embodied expressions of twinship should not and often do not last indefinitely. Parents of

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different-sex twins in particular may make an early decision to dress their children in different outfits because their children’s different genders demands expression past babyhood.

Structuring twinship Part I of this book has explored how twinship is structured for twins in some ways. Whilst dominant discourses can shape public expectations by setting out the key defining features of ‘twinship’ and how they should ‘grow up’, parents, to varying extents, also perpetuate and utilise these normative expectations in their own parenting practices. Parents, then, have a role to play in constructing twinship for their twins and thus also participate in shaping cultural understandings of twinship through their everyday social actions. Yet this is only one part of the story. As Part II will now go on to show, children also have a role to play.

Notes 1. These set out normative ideas about the ‘right age’/time to do things – for instance, to leave home and start a family of one’s own. 2. One of the drawbacks of obtaining information about parenting practices via interviews is that we can never be sure how far the views expressed actually translate into actions. Participant observation would provide a more reliable tool in this sense. However, this is difficult to achieve in families precisely because they are identified as private institutions. Some families did let me spend time with them aside from the interviews and, where possible, notes on these social interactions have been added into the analysis.

Part II Agency Contexts

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4 Bodies

Part II of this book explores the identity-work that twins actively participate in and thus how dominant discourses of childhood and twinship are also displayed, reiterated, modified and resisted by twins themselves. To this end, this chapter explores how twins use their bodies as resources to construct their identities. The body is an important resource for presenting ourselves as certain sorts of people and classifying others. It provides clues about who we are and also helps us to form opinions about other people. For twins, the body takes on particular importance because, as we have seen, twinship is principally signified through the body or, more specifically, through bodily expressions of sameness. Both dress and physical sameness are significant here. Importantly, however, the body provides us with both opportunities and constraints. This chapter therefore draws attention to the symbolic power of the body alongside an appreciation of the limits of physicality.

Presenting identity through the body Goffman, a Canadian sociologist, principally drew attention to the body as a symbolic entity. For him, the body is both invested with social meanings and also communicates social meanings to others. Goffman is most useful for helping us to understand how identities are actually ‘done’ and achieved. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969), Goffman employs a dramaturgical analysis whereby social life is theorised in terms of a theatrical performance. For him, social life is the stage upon which various actors take up and activate their various roles and ‘fronts’ (or outward standardised displays of a particular identity). Often we act before an audience in the front stage region of space. Here we 91

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are likely to observe ‘certain moral and instrumental requirements or standard in the activity – in this personal front, “manner” or “decorum” (polite-ness, appearance) will be important’ (Roberts, 2006: 68). But we can also act ‘backstage’, where these behavioural rituals will be temporarily relaxed; for instance, when we complain about a customer in the staff room. Whilst on stage, actors present their identities to others, managing the impressions they give off in the hope of both portraying a convincing performance and, importantly, one which gains the acceptance of the audience. This acceptance helps to secure a kind of ‘working consensus’ which then facilitates the smooth flow of interaction (Goffman, 1969: 21). ‘Face-work’ and ‘body-work’ are important here (Goffman, 1967: 12). For instance, during a business meeting, we know that we should uphold the outward display of interest. This means that our bodies literally have to look interested. We need to avoid checking our watch and yawning, as this implies a desire to leave the room and boredom. Instead, we should remain attentive. Like actors in a theatre, we make use of various settings and props to help us in our presentations of self (Goffman, 1969: 32). For instance, in the above example, we may sit with a pen (poised to write) or make use of other props offered within the setting of the boardroom (such as a flip chart or computer) to help us participate in the role we are presenting or, in Goffman’s words, to give ‘dramatic realization’ to the role we are performing (Goffman, 1969: 40). Despite Goffman’s emphasis on the human agency that actors display in their everyday interactions with each other, he does not think that actors can simply be anybody they choose to be. For one thing, the rituals of social interaction set some limitations, demanding that we interact with each other in ways which convey appropriate personal demeanour and display deference to those with whom we are interacting (Goffman, 1981). More relevant to our consideration of the body and social identity is how the social meanings attached to particular bodily styles and appearances, and the very physicality of the body itself may structure and potentially also limit one’s presentations of self. Goffman argues that one structuring component of our bodily presentations of self is the shared meanings that surround regularised and institutionalised non-verbal expressions of identity (or ‘body idioms’). This includes the meanings we attach to and which are reflected through embodied actions such as the way we dress, our physical gestures, movement, emotional expressions and so on (Goffman, 1963a: 33). Hence, these shared vocabularies of body idiom help us to ‘classify information

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given off by bodies’ (Shilling, 2003: 72). For instance, dress, specifically identical outfits, symbolically conveys twin identity. In Goffman’s analysis of stigma we get some sense of the limitations which the physicality of the body can place on our identity work. According to Goffman, some stigmas may be more visible than others. He distinguishes between discreditable and discredited persons (Goffman, 1963b: 57). Discredited people are those whose stigma is immediately apparent or evident. Discreditable persons are those whose stigma is not immediately apparent or known about; as such, these people may be able to hide or manage their ‘difference’ in ways that help to normalise them. For instance, Goffman compares an ex-mental patient, whose stigma is not readily visible, with a blind person, whose difference is more easily identified not only because of the possible presence of a white cane, but also because of their ‘failure to direct [their] face to the eyes of [their] co-participants’ (Goffman, 1963b: 65). Whilst it may be easier for discreditable persons to be able to ‘pass’ as ‘normal’, this ‘passing’ carries the threat of discovery. Hence, although we make a range of assumptions and classifications to help us to identify people as specific sorts of persons, a ‘characterisation in effect’, these may then later be overturned (or validated) in light of the evidence and information we receive (1963b: 12). If the person turns out to be someone rather different from whom we originally thought they were, they can be discredited. Passing as a non-twin may therefore involve some body-work, especially for those twins who look very alike, who look like ‘twins’. Goffman’s approach has currency in late-modern society, where we are all encouraged to work on, manage and care for our bodies. Giddens’ (1991) analysis of late modernity argues that as traditional markers of identity decline in significance and we become more individually responsible for creating our own sense of who we are, the body becomes central in communicating identity. As Shilling argues: In the affluent West, there is a tendency for the body to be seen as an entity which is in the process of becoming: a project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual’s self-identity (Shilling, 2003: 4). Consumer society provides us with a range of products, options and regimes to help us do this, from diets and gyms to chemical and surgical procedures. This is not to say that people have not actually engaged in body projects before, but, as Shilling notes, the distinguishing feature of

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modern body projects is their concern to express an individual’s identity (Shilling, 2003: 174). More specifically, Stewart has highlighted the potential of such dramaturgical analyses for providing a more ‘active’ analysis of twinship: In the drama of twinship, the relevant actors are twins who, according to the model, may perform in face-to-face interaction, create impressions, manipulate perceptions and seek to control their audience. This emphasis on the active rather than the merely passive role is certainly a useful corrective to the passive portrait offered by socialization theory (Stewart, 2003: 156). Certainly, we will see some empirical examples of how twins try to manage the impressions they give off in this part of the book. Yet, despite the advantages of Goffman’s approach, he provides far less insight into how we experience our identities through our bodies, thereby neglecting an important aspect of our human embodiment. As well as conveying meaning to other people, our bodies also provide us with our own sense of who we are. I don’t just live inside my body, I am my body. Through the body we develop sensory experience of the world and we also live in the world. As Csordas (1994) explains, the body is an acting, empirical, experiencing entity that constitutes the grounding for the self. We can therefore talk of embodied subjectivities; that sense of self which emerges through our experience of our bodies. Bodily constraints may shape our experiences of who we are, as well as our presentations of self. The body, as Woodward points out, ‘is not only represented and inscribed, it is also experienced and can present enormous restrictions to the range of that experience and to the ways in which we can negotiate our identities’ (Woodward, 2002: 133). All this underlines the fact that we need to take the physicality of the body seriously. Social constructionist approaches (which Goffman is aligned to) have been criticised for their failure to do just this (Shilling, 1997). Therefore, as Shilling points out, we need an approach that combines the social with the corporeal. For Shilling (2003), the body is simultaneously ‘material’ and ‘symbolic’, enabling and constraining. The body cannot be reduced to discourse: as a biological organism which has evolved over time, it is the source of our ability to participate in society. Real physical bodies are born into societies. However, this biology is not completely determining. Rather, it sets limits on who or what we can be. Bodies are both the source and outcome of social relations, providing the

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basis for social relationships and being given meaning through them. In this sense, then, the body is ‘unfinished’; during the course of social life, individuals work on their bodies, social meanings are given to the body; bodies physically change and new corporeal limits are erected. As such, for Shilling: the body is most profitably conceptualized as an unfinished biological and social phenomenon which is transformed, within certain limits, as a result of its entry into, and participation in, society (2003: 11). Shilling’s approach provides the overarching theoretical impetus to this chapter. His model allows us to see how the physicality of the body may be literally transformed or given the finishing touches through dress, a cultural tool that contributes to the symbolic translation of materiality into cultural images or signifiers (Warwick and Cavallaro, 1998: 3). Importantly, Shilling’s model draws our attention back to the ways in which bodies are situated within the internal-external dialectic of identification; bodies are judged and classified by others, whilst also providing the basis for experiencing and classifying the self. Finally, Shilling’s unfinished body mediates between structure and agency, being shaped and interpreted through discourse while also constituting the grounds for human action. All of these dimensions draw our attention to the enabling and constraining power of the body within the process of identity construction. Although we may want to present the self as someone or something else, our bodies may refuse to be moulded into line, making it difficult for us to receive external validation and verification. Identities are thus continually managed and negotiated (moving between various possibilities) within the process of social interaction. The following sections therefore trace out the creative and limiting powers of the body, exploring how twins experience their identities through their bodies and use their bodies as resources for negotiating their identities.

Presenting sameness through the body Many of the twins in this study were non-identical twins who looked physically different from each other. The very materiality of their bodies thus provided them with varying degrees of opportunity for negotiating their ‘twin’ identities. However, there were differences between the ways in which twins managed and used these different-looking bodies. The youngest twins tried to demonstrate that they looked the same.

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Arriving to interview non-identical twins Ash and Harry (aged eight), I noticed that they were dressed in identical outfits. Within the interview context, Ash and Harry both drew my attention to this dimension of their sameness: Ash: Yeah. You can hardly tell our clothes, that they’re different. [They line themselves up against each other – side by side.] Although their mother Clare may have played a large part in presenting their bodies in this way through dressing them in identical clothes, by positioning their bodies side by side in physical space, Ash and Harry further this representation of twinness and actively use their bodies to encourage me to view their sameness. They therefore participate in ‘finishing off’ their own bodies, helping to draw attention away from their physical differences and encouraging me to attribute their bodies with an alternative set of cultural meanings. As ‘symbolic tokens’ (Woodward, 1997: 4), Ash and Harry’s matching outfits convey a sense in which they ‘belong’ together and to the category ‘twins’. This display of sameness could potentially help Ash and Harry to secure symbolic and social capital. Certainly, within the home setting, where, as we saw in Chapter 3, mum Clare likes to see them dressed the same, there is little threat from social stigma. Entering this setting as an adult visitor and someone who Ash and Harry know to be interested in twins, I am someone who can potentially validate their ‘specialness’ by confirming that they look the same.

The significance of difference for older children In contrast with these young twins, the accounts provided by the older children and adult twins point to the negative value attributed to such expressions of sameness in late childhood and adulthood. As Rachel (aged 20) explained when talking about some twins that attended her university, ‘it’s a bit weird. When you’re 20 you really should have your own identity rather than being a twin’. Expressions of embodied difference therefore become more important as children get older and try to mark themselves out as ‘individuals’. Thus, Justin (aged 22) remembered how, aged 12, he and his brother ‘just tried to differ from each other in as many ways as possible’; likewise, the older child twins explained how they did not like to look the same: Charlotte: I don’t like going around wearing anything the same as anyone.

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Ian: I don’t like looking the same as another person as well though. Peter: No it’s good to be different. Ian and Peter explained why it was good to look different: Peter: Because we’re totally different human beings aren’t we? Ian: Erm … because it’s like, it’s like a law that you have to wear the same clothes [as twins] but I don’t like to. It makes you feel like a real bore. I mean, it would cause arguments as well because if Peter wanted to wear a bright red jumper that means I’d have to wear it or if I wanted to wear sommat [Peter sniggers in the background] we’d like argue […]. In Peter’s words, ‘it’s good to be different’: difference allows for autonomy and freedom of choice, and reflects individual uniqueness. Indeed, ‘we frequently encounter the popular idea that clothing is (or ought to be) an “expression” of “individuality”’ (Corrigan, 2008: 110). Studies of youth cultures have drawn attention to the importance of the body in signifying difference. In his analysis of US youth culture, Giroux argues that ‘[i]t has been through the body that youth displayed their own identities through oppositional subcultures, styles, transgressive sexuality, and disruptive desires’ (Giroux, 1998: 28). Expressions of bodily difference, however, take on added significance for twins, who are principally identified as ‘twins’ in relation to how they look. Many of the older child twins were quite explicit about the increased value that such expressions of difference took on as they got older: Peter: […] I’m glad that we didn’t dress the same [when we were younger] cos we’d probably be dressing the same now. Charlotte: I didn’t mind [being dressed the same] when I was little, but I wouldn’t like to be dressed the same now I’m older. Kate: Would you ever wear the same clothes do you think? Dan: The odd thing probably, but generally… We wouldn’t go out wearing the same thing unless it was a joke or something. Thus, whilst Ash and Harry (aged eight) delighted in their bodily similarities, these older twins confine sameness within a past ‘childhood’. Dan also defines it as a joking activity; something which should not be taken seriously. When describing how she would dress her own twin children if she had any, Olivia (aged 16) also cordoned off this activity

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within the boundaries of childhood and, in keeping with this, described it as something ‘fun’, that is, as something enjoyable: Olivia: […] I would like maybe keep [dressing them the same] as like a fun [thing] for when they’re really small but I wouldn’t carry it on when they’re like six or seven. Kate: Why do you think you’d stop dressing them the same– Olivia: [Interrupts] I don’t know, cos I just feel like they might get a bit, don’t know … if they want to carry it on then they would, but they can have their choice to choose their own clothes. Mirroring some of the parental accounts given in the previous chapter, Olivia associates increased age with choice and competent decision making. These (hypothetical) twins only choose to opt out of twinship. Dan and Olivia’s accounts also reflect broader cultural sentiments about the appropriateness of child and adult twins dressing in similar or identical clothes. While this may be ‘fun’ when children are young, it turns into a joke when they are grown up.

Childhood, twinship and social stigma Twinship can therefore be both a source of physical capital and social stigma. Following Goffman, we can argue that stigma emerges from social processes. Rather than being an innate trait, stigma is a result of social classifications whereby some traits are marked out as ‘normal’ and others as undesirably different and deeply discrediting (Goffman, 1963b: 13). According to adult twin Rachel, there is a ‘comic-ness’ and also a ‘hint of tragic-ness’ about adult twins looking the same. Andrea’s memories of how things were when she was an older child also imply a similar scenario: Andrea: I didn’t want her to wear the same as me. […] I wouldn’t want to wear it at the same time [as Rebecca] cos people [would say] like, ‘oh look at them two, idiots!’ Older children and adults who dress exactly the same may become invested with comedy value precisely because this is the opposite of what we expect them to be like. They may also be thought to be ‘tragic’, ‘weird’ or ‘stupid’ because their dressing alike signifies that they have remained as children rather than grown up into adults. Such social attitudes point to the negative social valuing of the social category ‘children’.

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Therefore, on a general level we can say that whilst babies and young children may attract positive public (adult) attention for looking the same because they are firmly positioned within the social institution of childhood, older children, who are expected to be moving towards adulthood, may be stigmatised for looking the same. On a more specific level, however, we should also take account of the social context within which this process of attributing stigma or social capital emerges. For instance, Ash and Harry (aged eight) may have been able to obtain social capital from their bodily expressions of twinship at home (where their parents and I are all interested in their being twins). Research with children in schools, however, suggests that expressions of difference may potentially be important markers of identity when amongst other children. For instance, James’ (1993) ethnographic account of children’s social relationships found that expressions of bodily sameness (associated with being a younger (infant) child) are quickly dispelled even after children enter the social world of the primary school. Once an effective method of establishing a sense of belonging (for example, making a bid for friendship and locating one’s self alongside other children at school), sameness now becomes translated as a sign of ‘copying’, a classification that signifies the growing importance of expressions of individuality: Among the older children who had become more actively involved in the social world of childhood, far from being appreciated and remarked upon, such behaviour was positively discouraged … ‘being the same’ as another moves from its conceptual classification as a sign of sociality to something which discriminates and stigmatises (James, 1993: 141, 142). In line with this, Valentine (2000) highlights the importance attached to expressions of individuality within young people’s (aged 11–18) peer group cultures. Ash and Harry’s bodily expressions of sameness (described at the start of this chapter) may thus need to be modified when in the presence of other children at school if they are to avoid being stigmatised as copycats (who look too much like each other to be regarded as anybody specific), whilst Rebecca and Andrea’s mutual display of difference may help them to demonstrate their achievement of individuality and status as older children. Possibly unsurprisingly, many of the older children who spoke with me talked of their attempts to look different.

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Constructing difference through dress Although many of the older child twins said they wore different clothes, some also explained how parents and relatives continued to buy them identical or similar outfits. However, not wanting to look ‘the same’, Ian and Peter made sure that they did not wear any ‘identical’ clothes at the same time: Ian: We do have the same clothes but we don’t wear them at the same time. Peter: We do have different ones as well. Kate: Why do you choose not to wear the same clothes at the same time? Peter: Because I think people treat you more like one person. Being identical-looking twins, these twins are potentially able to stage a convincing performance of twinship (they are physically alike and have the clothing available to further extend and amplify this sameness). However, for them, dress becomes a resource for transforming the exterior surface of the body, of symbolically severing the lines of belonging that once, in early childhood, served to assert their status as twins and children. Wearing different clothes provides some expression of uniqueness, something that may be particularly important for these identical-looking twins. Importantly, however, twins must monitor each other’s bodies in order to create and maintain these dichotomies, since they cannot be different if they choose to be different in the same ways! Morgan’s notion of ‘bodily density’ becomes particularly useful in this context. Referring to the ‘knowledge, control and care’ that we may have/take of other people’s bodies (Morgan, 1996: 132), this term effectively captures the relational nature of twins’ body-work. For example, Charlotte explained that if Hannah wore the same outfit as her, then she would ‘force her to change’, while Andrea remembered the disputes she and her twin sister had over who could buy what: Andrea: […] Sometimes if I saw something that I was gonna get, I’d like [say], ‘no you’re not getting it’. We would argue about that, and Rebecca used to do it a lot. ‘Oh I’m gonna get one of them’, ‘no I don’t want you to get one’. Similarly, Sally (aged 20) recalled how her twin sister tried to monitor and restrict what shoes she could buy:

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Sally: […] I mean she had a funny thing about this pair of shoes that she loved and she wouldn’t let me buy them. I went out secretly and bought them and hid them from her for two years […] Of course, if twins do buy the same attire, just how successful these strategies might be in encouraging the validation of individuality is questionable. Whilst twins who wear the same clothes or accessories at different times will not look exactly the same when they are together, this could still potentially suggest a lack of difference in style and taste. Moreover, if clothes come to be associated with one or other of the twins, it may imply interchangeability and ‘copying’ (that I can be you and you can also be me).

Instigators and followers Some twins took a more active role than others in asserting and upholding bodily expressions of difference. Thus, although twins have to monitor and modify each other’s bodily expressions of difference to ensure that they put on as convincing a performance of individuality as possible, this ‘finishing off’ process may be directed by one twin far more than the other. Peter identified his brother as the main instigator of difference: Peter: I used to say, let’s dress the same cos I always wanted to, I don’t know, to fool somebody, or something. I quite liked it. But then Ian used to say no, and then I thought, ‘no’ […]. Sally identified her sister Rachel as the main instigator: Sally: We got dressed [the same] until we were about … ooo God … we started kind of rebelling against that. Rachel specifically again … she’s kind of the one who rebelled against it a bit more than I did. Whilst instigators may therefore push for change and direct the performance of individuality, their co-twin may have chosen to retain some aspects of sameness (had their twin allowed it) (see also Bacon, 2006). This raises an important point: power relations are not simply the province of parents and children; they are also played out between children themselves. We will return to this point again in Chapter 5.

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Exchanging clothes Being integral to many of the older twins’ internal sense of individuality, clothes were always attributed to an owner. However, some of the female same-sex twins reported borrowing each other’s clothes. For Sally, this caused some unease between her and her (instigator) sister Rachel: Sally: […] She really didn’t like me borrowing her clothes when we were in sixth form and fifth year at all because we looked too similar. Kate: What people could see you– Sally: [Interrupts] Yes I think if someone saw me wearing the same thing as her I don’t think she’d like it because ‘oh you’re wearing Rachel’s clothes’. She always liked to be completely individual. More than I did I suppose. Charlotte and Hannah both told me that they took clothes from each other (without permission) and both talked of the arguments that stealing caused. Indeed, they tended to blame each other for this. As such, during their joint interview, Hannah told me that she would ‘go mad’ when Charlotte took her clothes and Charlotte also accused Hannah of taking her clothes: Charlotte: She had my trousers on and my top. I never wore that top once and she’s had it on all the time. Hannah: Yeah cos she never wears it. Kate: How did you manage to get her clothes then? Hannah: She was out. The absence of one’s twin can therefore provide opportunities to steal clothes and thus extend one’s wardrobe. If these are high quality and/or fashionable clothes, such an opportunity may be too valuable to miss out on. Thus, although Emma said she did not like sharing clothes, she also told me that ‘occasionally I will nick clothes, but only if they’re good ones’. Interestingly, the same scenario was not played out amongst the older boys. Although they were also clear about who owned which clothes, such accounts of exchange were notably absent from their accounts. Dan (aged 17) made this explicit: ‘we’ve never “can I borrow this can I borrow that”. We’ve never done that.’ Similarly, Justin (an adult same-sex twin) remembered:

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Justin: […] we never shared clothes. I don’t know, quite a few brothers and sisters do but erm … we’d never share … it used to be ‘this is mine’. You don’t want to sort of confuse identities or something, I’m not sure. Erm … so we were quite strict about that. This has some resonance with other research on sibling exchanges of clothing. Thus, Corrigan (2008: 117–19) found that whilst the degree of borrowing (or, to be more precise, stealing) was most pronounced within sister relationships, brothers’ wardrobes were relatively far more closed off. So why is borrowing less prevalent amongst boys? It is possible that rituals surrounding clothes are still more bound up with collective practices of femininity than masculinity. Women are still typically identified as having a strong interest in ‘dressing up’ and in practising expressions of femininity with other girl friends through sessions of ‘retail therapy’ and clothes swapping. For instance, in her US exploration of Teen Girlfriends, Julia DeVillers pinpoints the latter as one important dimension of girls’ friendships. Indeed, Angel, one of the girls she spoke with, said this was one of the best things about being a girl (DeVillers et al., 2002: 75). Unlike the same-sex male twins, the different-sex twins Adam and Olivia did exchange clothes, but this seemed to be a uni-directional exchange. Adam seemed comparatively relaxed about his twin sister Olivia borrowing his clothes. He explained that ‘Olivia usually borrows a jumper of mine, as long as she doesn’t ruin it’. However, Adam was less interested in borrowing clothes from his sister: Kate: Do you ever borrow jumpers of Olivia’s or anything like that? Adam: No [laughs] not really. Olivia borrows more stuff from me. The suggestion is laughed off, implying the inappropriateness of a boy borrowing ‘girl’ clothes as compared to a girl borrowing ‘boy’ clothes. Thus, Adam told me, ‘I think it’s easier for Olivia to do that’. Research suggests that whilst there has been some convergence in gendered clothing styles (for instance, a growth in unisex fashions), men’s fashion has remained more distanced from women’s fashion than women’s from men’s. As Diaz (2002: 3) points out, ‘female fashion has adopted traditional men’s styles much more often than men’s fashion has adopted women’s styles’. Implied in Adam’s comment is a clear sense of gender difference, an embodied and experienced difference that may explain this lack of concern over borrowing clothes. Unlike Sally and Rachel

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above, Olivia will not look very similar to her brother even if she wears his jumper. Indeed, swapping clothes does not present the same threat to bodily expressions of difference that it does for some same-sex twins.

Using the body to narrate difference On a more discursive level, twins utilised their bodies as resources for narrating difference. At times, these twins would pinpoint differences in the physicalities of their bodies: Ian: Erm ... He’s a bit taller and I think he’s slightly thinner cos he’s– Peter: I’m not thinner than you! I’m bigger than you, I’m bigger built than you. Ian: I know. Peter: But you just said I’m thinner than you. Ian: No but– Peter: You’re thinner than me. Ian: You’re more stretched than me. Peter: I’m just a bigger build than you Ian [laughs]. Ian: Oh right. Here, identical-looking twins Ian and Peter (aged 13) work out the precise dimensions of their physical differences. Peter takes a leading role trying to socialise his brother Ian into adopting his account. In this way, Peter tries to ensure that they both agree on the precise nature of their differences, thus avoiding any potential overlap in characteristics. Importantly, by pinpointing these differences, Ian and Peter train each other and me how to see their bodies. Emma and Ruth (also identical-looking twins) were slightly clearer about their physical differences. When they were drawing pictures of themselves together they told me: Ruth: I’m a bit taller than Emma [looking at her picture]. Emma: I’m a bit thinner than you [laughs looking at her drawing]. Kate: Are you actually taller then Emma? Ruth: Er ... I don’t know. Last time I think I was, but it changes. Emma: I have funny eyes and I’m thinner than Ruth […]. Kate: […] Who’s who then? [To Emma] Emma: Well that’s Ruth [on the left] cos she’s got shorter hair than me.

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Figure 4.1

‘Me and my twin’ – by Emma, aged 13

Like Ian and Peter, Emma and Ruth remark upon their bodily differences and thus distinguish between their fellow twin’s body and their own. As such, they also actively construct two distinct bodies. Their pictures become one medium through which they present themselves and each other in particular ways. Certain physical traits may be exaggerated, concealed or reshaped. For example, Emma’s picture (see Figure 4.1) shows the differences in length of hair and waistline quite dramatically. Through these drawings, twins can construct a particular version of identity that does not necessarily fit with the actual appearance of their physical bodies. Indeed, as Drotner (1996) suggests, children’s drawings can be interpreted as ‘sign systems’ that form repertoires of identity; in this case, they represent twins’ own understandings of who they are or their possible ways of being. Drawings therefore provide a medium through which twins attempt to negotiate their identities (Hawkins, 2002). Whilst such discursive constructions may provide these identicallooking twins with more scope to present themselves as physically unique persons, other non-identical twins also pointed out physical differences. Liam explained that whilst he had long hair, his brother had short hair. Interestingly, he actively drew on this bodily difference to help him narrate differences in personality: Liam: […] I’m more, I don’t conform that’s the thing. It always gets me into trouble you see. In school I don’t cut my hair so I’m singled out as a troublemaker. I’ve got […] long hair, I listen to loud music, I get drunk before school and turn up to school drunk, as Dan, he’s, ‘can’t go out tonight, playing rugby tomorrow’, ‘can’t go out tonight, I’ve got a test’. […] If he had long hair he’d shave it off. As I’m more, I’m not going to conform, I’ll do what I like. […] When

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I get to my grandma’s [my grandparents] think the same. They’ll think, ‘yeah Liam is bit of a rogue as Dan’s more …’. They don’t like call him the kind of perfect grandson but he is kind of, you know, what they all kind of love. Cos he’s a senior prefect, he’s captain of rugby, he was captain of cricket for a few years as well, and he was captain of athletics [laughs]. He’s got academic awards and sporting achievement awards er … And he’s just that kind of thing where grandma’s and grandpa’s think ‘oh great’. As I’m more, a lot laid back. I don’t really care what grades I get as long as I get passed the term, grow my hair and express my own opinions. As Dan’s, he’s a lot more responsible. Even if he thinks something he won’t say it because he’ll think ‘oh well, I might disappoint my grandma and grandpa’ whereas I’ll say it. Although Chapter 6 will examine the importance of contrast as a technique of talk in more detail, here we see how Liam’s long hair lies at the centre of his definition of who he is, namely a ‘non-conformist’ self-directed individual, and provides a physical basis for distinguishing between himself and his brother who is, by contrast, constructed as a ‘responsible’ conformist (with short hair). Importantly, this difference in hair length allows Liam to draw upon and reproduce two opposing ‘scripts’ of identity: the ‘rogue’ versus the ‘goody-two-shoes’. This again draws our attention back to the necessity of body monitoring. Twins must supervise their own and their fellow twin’s body if they are to ensure that such embodied differences are maintained. As Cohen and Taylor (1976: 68) point out, these ‘scripts are available to others who seek similar transformations of identity and experience; they are a common cultural resource’. As such, Liam’s identity may come under threat if Dan also grows his hair and chooses to practice this script of identity. ‘Script juxtaposition’ (Cohen and Taylor, 1976: 68) should therefore be maintained if uniqueness is to be upheld. Indeed, it is vital to Liam’s sense of being just a brother rather than a twin: Liam: I just think ... I think that since we’re so different we are nearer brothers, normal brothers than nearer twins. Liam’s embodied sense of difference makes him experience himself as being a ‘normal’ brother and encourages him to position himself further down the continuum of siblingship outlined in Chapter 2. Hence, as Csordas (1994) pointed out earlier on, we see how the body becomes the site and source for subjectivity.

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Physical resemblances Some of the twins and siblings of twins spoke about physical family resemblances. Hannah explained that her nose was ‘flatter’ than Charlotte’s, and Charlotte explained that she and Hannah had ‘different eyes, different nose, different mouth’. This in turn led her to conclude that ‘she looks like my mum, I like look like my dad’. Adam, Olivia and their siblings, Craig and Naomi, all told me that people often said that Olivia looked like Naomi and Adam like Craig. For instance, Adam explained, ‘Everyone says that I look like Craig and Olivia looks like Naomi’ and similarly Naomi told me: Naomi: […] everybody just says that Olivia and I look so alike. Not that anyone thinks that we’re twins but … you know, people say, ‘you two look so similar. Olivia just looks like you Naomi’. Rather than ‘oh Adam and Olivia look similar’. Similar gendered distinctions were made by John, brother to Emma and Ruth: Kate: Do you think that there are any family resemblances in your family? John: Yeah. Kate: Who’s like your dad then? John: Me, cos I’m identical to him when he were a boy, my mum and my sisters. Examining these accounts, it seems that where there are differently gendered siblings within the family (as was the case for John, Ruth and Emma, and Adam, Olivia, Craig and Naomi), such distinctions are generally upheld and maintained through appropriate gender matchings. Being the only boy in his family, John aligns himself to his dad and groups both of his twin sisters with his mum. A different scenario emerges for twins Adam and Olivia who, because they have both boy and girl siblings, can be placed in appropriate sibling gender groups: Adam looks like his brother and Olivia looks like her sister. Where there are no gender distinctions to mark out between twins and their siblings, twins can more easily be placed on either ‘side’ of the family to mark out their difference from each other: Charlotte looks like her dad and Hannah like her mum. Another important point to emerge from this is the amount of consensus held between family members about physical resemblances.

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Caroline, like her daughter Hannah, situated Charlotte with her dad and Hannah with her mum. Adam and Olivia and their siblings all agreed on how they were often identified. We will also see some further aspects of this in Chapter 6 when we look at how twins describe their own personalities.

Taste in clothes In addition to family resemblances, twins also utilised descriptions of their tastes in clothes to narrate difference: Charlotte: She goes for trackers and I go for girly clothes. Hannah: I never wear trackers now. I [haven’t] even got any trackers. Charlotte: Yeah but you wear stuff like black trousers and I like wear denim. Here, Charlotte seems adamant to maintain some level of distinction between the two bodies. She begins by pinpointing herself as the ‘girly’ dresser, but Hannah disagrees with her characterisation of her as a person that wears ‘trackers’. Charlotte therefore turns to focus on another difference, contrasting black trousers to denim. Like Charlotte, Ruth and Emma also drew on discourses of gender to help them differentiate themselves from each other; however, unlike Charlotte and Hannah, Ruth and Emma both agreed on the nature of these differences: Ruth: […] Mainly most of my clothes are either pink or a bright colour. Emma: And dresses! Ruth: Yeah, most of em are dresses. Emma: I’m trousers and shorts! According to Emma, Ruth wears ‘dresses’, while she is trousers and shorts. The agreement they share is especially important for these twins, because they look physically alike and so may rely more heavily on the significatory power of dress to differentiate between them. Emma’s last sentence perfectly demonstrates the way in which these bodily styles become metaphors of the self: she does not just wear trousers and shorts, they are who she is! Dress is therefore both a means of exteriorising and interiorising identity; it presents an outward presentation of self whilst also folding back in on itself to inject

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Figure 4.2

‘Me and my twin’ – by Ruth, aged 13

social meanings into our internal sense of who we are (Warwick and Cavallaro, 1998: 15). Similar differences were represented in Ruth’s picture (see Figure 4.2). Ruth explained what she had drawn: Ruth: Emma’s wearing a jumper, which is this other jumper that we got, and these trousers and some trainers again and I’m wearing a jacket and this skirt and some shoes. Unlike Emma’s picture (shown earlier in the chapter), here Ruth and Emma are depicted as similar in facial features, facial expressions and body shape. The differences highlighted amongst these similarities relate to style and taste. Ruth appeals to a feminine/tomboy distinction to construct them as discretely embodied ‘opposites’. Dress becomes an important signifier of difference in this pictorial representation precisely because their bodies appear so similar. In contrast, dress is less important in Emma’s picture because their physical bodies are positioned as the most important signifiers of difference. Yet in both cases, Emma and Ruth use their bodies to accentuate difference and thus to distance themselves from assumptions of twin sameness. Indeed, being identical-looking

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older child twins, it is perhaps no surprise that these twins were adamant that they did not fall into the (stereotyped) category ‘twins’: Kate: Do you think that people have ideas about what a twin is? Emma: People think we dress the same, you act the same, but we don’t! Ruth: No! Emma: People think we dress the same, you act the same, but we don’t! In contemporary times, men are also taking an interest in appearance. Indeed, fashion and grooming advice constitutes one narrative of men’s magazines (Gauntlett, 2008: 172). Reflecting this trend, the concern to emphasise differences in taste were not confined to the girls; the older boys also had some interest in the way they looked: Dan: We are completely … I quite like the– Liam: [Interrupts] Loud shirts. Dan: No, let’s just say, there’s like […] some that are absolutely terrible but there’s the odd few that are very tasteful actually, so I go for those. Liam: I’m a lot more plain. Ian: […] He’s got these Levi trousers that– Peter: [Interrupts] Are quite flarey. Ian: They go in then they go out. I wouldn’t wear them. […] I’m not really into like really baggy clothes. Peter: Not that it’s like– Ian: [Interrupts] I just like clothes what you can do stuff in. Leaving aside the fact that these twins speak on behalf of each other for our later discussion of twin talk (Chapter 6), we see that these expressions of taste say something about the character of the twins. Thus, Ian’s dislike for baggy clothes reflects that he is an ‘active’ person who likes to ‘do stuff’, while Liam’s plain clothes stand as metaphors for the self (‘I’m more plain’) in the same way that Emma’s ‘trousers and shorts’ did. Unlike these same-sex twins, the different-sex twins Adam and Olivia (aged 16) seemed far less concerned about using dress to narrate difference: Kate: Do you have the same taste in clothes now? Different? A bit the same? A bit different?

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Adam: Oh that’s a bit difficult. Olivia always goes for jeans and things don’t you? Olivia: We go to that, that top he’s got on’s from ‘Extreme’ [shop]. We go to ‘Extreme’ and get clothes from ‘Extreme’. Here, Adam finds it ‘difficult’ to pinpoint any differences, asking Olivia for confirmation. Olivia also implies some commonality in taste by saying that they shop at the same place. Given that their very physicalities already communicate gender difference, dress need not take on the significance that it does in the accounts of the other older same-sex twins.

Holding on to twinship Whilst, as we have seen, many older twins tried to use their bodies to distance themselves from notions of twin sameness, some did not give up on this aspect of twin identity completely. Emma and Ruth explained: Ruth: We wear the same stuff but [in a] different colour. Kate: What now? Emma: Yeah different colour. Similarly, Charlotte said that she would wear the same clothes as her sister Hannah if they were in a different colour. In fact, she told me that they both wore a similar top to their birthday meal. Some twins may also want to be known as twins by their friends. Charlotte and Hannah and Adam and Olivia all chose to tell people at school that they were twins. In certain situations, then, older children may actually publicly announce their status as twins. Possibly, older child twins may miss the public attention that they once received as young children and therefore try to reclaim aspects of this. Our ambivalent attitude towards older child twins, wanting them to become unique whilst also wanting them to be close (see Chapter 2), could mean that some of these twins may potentially be able to obtain status from appearing as similar. For different-looking twins Charlotte and Hannah, their skilful balancing of individuality and twinship (wearing identical outfits but in a different colour) may help them to uphold their status as individuals whilst lending some support to their claims that they are twins. It is interesting that Hannah and Charlotte chose to wear similar tops at their birthday party, since this would underline their status as twins, a status which was already being publicly announced and celebrated at their ‘joint’ party.

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Some of the adult twins also returned to participate in those activities that, as older children, they had wanted to prevent. For example, Rebecca explained that she and her sister Andrea ‘always want to borrow each other’s clothes’ now they are adults. Andrea (aged 23) also explained how she and her sister would sometimes wear similar looking outfits: Andrea: Sometimes I’ll go out in a top and trousers that are similar like same colours but different. And we’d laugh because it’s like we’re just nipping to pub or something. Andrea plays down the significance of these expressions of similarity. Their tops and trousers are described as the ‘same colours but different’ and are only worn when nipping to the pub, a brief and seemingly relatively insignificant activity. In this context, dressing in similar outfits causes laughter and is presented as non-serious. Like Andrea, Sally explained how her sister Rachel now felt more comfortable about them buying the same clothes and swapping clothes: Sally: […] We went out shopping together and I liked this top and I showed her it and she thought I was picking it out for her. I said, ‘no. I was picking it out for me’ and she goes, ‘I might try it on’ and I went ‘fine I will too’. [We] both tried it on. I mean it’s not like just a red top, it’s bright pink and stripy. Like a polo shirty thing. It’s pretty dam striking. You couldn’t mistake it for another top. She bought it and I bought it and she didn’t mind at all. This was since we’ve been at uni. And I kind of realised that she’s obviously changed in that way. She doesn’t mind us wearing the same things, preferably if we don’t wear it on the same day cos it’s pretty similar. We laughed about it cos we said we definitely look like twins looking like this. But she doesn’t mind doing that anymore and she doesn’t mind me borrowing her clothes much anymore. She used to but since we’ve been at uni she doesn’t mind me borrowing them. Again, dressing alike causes laughter. As Sally put it, ‘we laughed about it cos we said we definitely look like twins looking like this’. Amongst these adult twins, then, dressing alike seems to be a kind of play-acting, a bid to once again look like twins. Indeed, it is the nonpermanent nature of these activities that may help these twins to maintain their social standing as ‘adults’. For the most part, Sally lives away from her sister Rachel at university, so there is less opportunity for them

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to shop for clothes together and physically exchange clothes. Moreover, as Chapter 5 will examine in more detail, she feels that she has her ‘own’ friends and space to be herself. Given this, swapping clothes from time to time may pose less threat to her sense of individuality than it may have done when she was younger and living with her sister. As Chapter 5 will show, she now has people (at university) who will verify her status as ‘Sally’ rather than as ‘Sally and Rachel’. Similarly, Rebecca and Andrea talked of how they had already ‘split up’. As the next chapter will demonstrate, they too have lived apart from each other, and explained how they each have their ‘own friends’ and different interests from each other. Comfortable in the knowledge that they have ‘made the break’ from each other, these twins may feel less concerned to continually practice and affirm the boundaries of this divide through always looking different. On the contrary, as these examples suggest, they may take some pleasure in temporarily rekindling some (diluted) aspects of twin sameness precisely because they have been left behind. Through dressing alike, but laughing at their own actions, these twins can momentarily make themselves feel special again whilst still offsetting the potential stigma which could emerge if their actions were to be taken seriously.

The limits of physicality Although twins’ bodies may provide them with various opportunities for managing and producing a particular version of self, it can constrain the extent to which twins can transform their identities. Being central to cultural conceptualisations of twinship and the successful performance of twinship, the presence of physical sameness will have an impact on the extent to which twins can ‘pass’ (Goffman, 1963b: 92) as non-twins. Most of the twins in this study were non-identical, different-looking twins who did not conform to the cultural stereotype of identical twinship. Fittingly, some expressed how others did not think they were twins: Kate: What do people say when they see you together? Do they think you’re twins? Hannah: They don’t believe us. […] Kate: Why do you think that they don’t think you’re twins? Charlotte: Cos we don’t look like each other and I’m small and she’s tall.

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Dan: I think that when people think ‘twin’ they do think identical. I think it’s because we’re not [that] they maybe don’t associate us with being twins. The perception of physical differences therefore makes it difficult for onlookers to believe that they are twins. Indeed, like Dan (aged 17), Hannah (aged 15) explained that they were not known as ‘twins’ but ‘just known as sisters because we look totally different from each other’. These ‘external’ readings of identity can feed back into how twins think about themselves. As Hannah also said, ‘[if we were identical] they’d notice that we were twins but we don’t [look alike], so we’re just like sisters’. Different-sex twins may find it even more difficult to be ‘spotted’ as twins: Kate: What do they say to you when they find out you’re twins? Olivia: Quite surprised. Kate: What do you think Adam? Adam: They go … they’re just a bit surprised I think. Kate: Why do you think they’re surprised? Adam: Well because they usually think of twins as a boy and a boy or a girl and a girl. Cultural interpretations of this gender difference therefore serve to position different-sex twins outside of normative definitions of twinship. They are too different to be twins. This once again points to the power of social categories of gender to override and conceal twin identity. These different-looking twins may therefore have more work to do if they wish to assert their twin identities and be acknowledged as twins. It is clear that the very physicalities of some twins’ bodies may limit the extent to which they can be spotted as twins and the extent to which they may have this social identity validated by others. These ‘invisible’ twins thus need to actively identify themselves as twins, their oral ‘presentations of self’ doing the work that their physical traits cannot. As previously mentioned, Hannah and Charlotte, and Adam and Olivia told friends at school that they were twins. Yet twins who say they are twins but do not have the bodies to ‘match’ may find it more difficult to get this version of identity validated by others. On the other hand, in telling others that they are twins, whilst appearing to look very different from each other, these twins also participate

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in modifying cultural notions of twinship through their embodied action. Conversely, those twins who looked very alike may find it more difficult to escape being publicly known as ‘twins’: Ruth: […] When [people at school are] talking about us both they call us ‘twins’ instead of Ruth and Emma. Onlookers may also find it difficult to ‘tell the difference’, confusing names with bodies. In her essay on what life would be like if she wasn’t a twin, Emma explained that there would be ‘no more people mistaking me for Ruth or people mistaking Ruth for me’. Being mixed up by friends made her feel ‘a bit annoyed’. Not surprisingly, she explained that she would confirm her own name when people called her ‘Ruth’: Emma: Well I just react by saying, ‘Emma’ [impatiently]. Ruth: And I just go, ‘No! Ruth’. Some other identical-looking twins explained how they would answer to each other’s names: Peter: […] Sometimes if someone says Ian I’ll still turn round cos they might be calling to me. Interchangeability works against the cultural ideal of bodily particularity. As Turner notes, ‘to have an identity is to have a particular identity and to have a particular identity is to have a particular body which is socially recognisable as your body’ (Turner, 1986: 6). Thus, even though Peter and Ian may wish to be acknowledged as different, external others may identify them as twins, drawing attention to their bodily relatedness1 rather than their bodily distinctiveness. In this sense, members of the public may ‘finish off’ twins’ bodies on their behalf. Within the spatial context of the school, it may be more difficult for these twins to assert their uniqueness through dress. The school uniform effectively helps to mould pupils into one homogeneous mass, constraining expressions of individual style by enforcing a standardised dress code. As such, this also serves to convey a sense of the school’s ‘corporate’ identity: ‘as schools have begun to operate in a competitive market, uniform has come to be used as a tactic of

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impression management in the projection of school identity’ (Swain, 2002: 54). Drawing on Goffman (1968), we may go slightly further and argue that school uniforms represent one part of a ‘mortification process’ whereby children are stripped of their identities and admitted into the institutionalised culture of the school. Certainly, from a Foucauldian perspective, school uniform may constitute a discipline of control (Foucault, 1977) because it constitutes a means of regulating children’s bodies in space. When in uniform, children represent the school and as such are encouraged to behave in accordance with the rules of the school. Differences between children’s styles, tastes and socioeconomic status are played down. Indeed, fears that some children may use violence to acquire desirable consumer products displayed on other children’s bodies are commonly cited amongst the reasons for adopting a uniform dress code. However, underlying such explanations are a whole range of assumptions about what childhood as a social space should be like. As Bodine (2003: 60) notes, ‘children’s clothing serves as a screen on which are projected all kinds of beliefs, anxieties and aspirations about children’. Amongst other things, childhood is presented as a ‘protected space’ that should be controlled by adults and defended against violence and social and economic hierarchy. Furthermore, and importantly, it is presented as a de-personified social space populated by characterless beings. Twins who require dress to convey a sense of their own distinctiveness may therefore find it more difficult to receive public affirmation of their difference. Hence, identical-looking twins Emma and Ruth were usually spotted as twins at school. In other situations, it may also be difficult for some twins to be recognised as twins because they look as different from each other as they do from other children. Thus, as we saw earlier, Charlotte and Hannah said that they were not spotted as twins. In those situations where the physicality of the body constrains the extent to which twins can be ‘seen’ to be unique persons, other strategies have to be adapted to convey individuality. Emma (aged 13) explained how she relied on being ‘known’ by her friends: Emma: People that know I’ve got a twin always call us ‘the twins’ but once they get to know us then they just call us our names. Importantly, both Emma and Ruth have to be ‘known’ in order to be different. This difference is then symbolically marked through the attribution of ‘personal’ names. Personality thus potentially becomes a vital resource for portraying differences and helping friends to learn how to

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read bodily styles and attribute them with the correct name. However, this may not always be successful: Emma: Your friends can tell you apart as well because they’ve known you for a while. That’s ok. Does Sarah get me muddled up wi[th] you, sometimes calls me Ruth? Ruth: [Looking almost offended] Oh! Clearly, then, Ruth, like Emma, did not like the thought of being ‘mixed up’ with her twin sister! Conversely, those twins who ‘look’ like unique persons will have to find ways of hiding this embodied identity if they are to ‘pass’ as twins and become interchangeable. Charlotte and Hannah were able to use their voices; as Charlotte explained, ‘when we’re on the phone, we speak the same’. Hannah recalled one instance when Charlotte passed herself off as her: Hannah: She starts acting stupid though. Cos my boyfriend phoned the other day she went, ‘hang on. I’ll just go and get her’ and she came back and went, ‘hello it’s Hannah’ and he believed her. In this scenario, Charlotte may have been able to exploit this interchangeability to gain access to ‘private’ information about her sister’s relationship.

Twinship, the body and identity The body provides twins with a valuable resource for negotiating their identities as they grow up. Twins use their bodies to navigate a pathway towards adulthood, with older child twins tending to emphasise difference in line with cultural expectations that they will develop as individuals. However, this movement away from sameness towards difference is not a clear-cut and finite transition. Even though older twins tend to emphasise their differences through their bodies, some cling on to aspects of twin sameness and may not give up on them altogether as they move into adulthood. Indeed, it seems that whilst sameness is forfeited, it is also snatched back. Older child and adult twins may occasionally choose to dress alike, bringing their status as twins back into view. Thus, whilst twins are expected to sacrifice physical expressions of twin sameness as they get older and become adults, the extraordinariness of this identity may be hard to give up on.

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For non-identical twins, although the physical appearance of their bodies may make their status as twins difficult to detect and provide a useful basis for amplifying and fashioning difference, the physicality of identical-looking twins’ bodies may work to constrain the extent of such creativity. It may be more difficult for these twins to escape being socially classified as twins when caught up in social interaction with other embodied actors. Yet since some of these older twins also wanted to cling on to some aspects of twinship, the absence of this may make it difficult for different-looking twins to attract attention as twins! Nevertheless, the body still provides twins with a resource for expressing their identities and a medium through which to experience their identities, whether that be as ‘normal’, ‘stupid’ or ‘special’ persons, as ‘twins’, ‘sisters’ or ‘brothers’.

Note 1. This term refers to the ways in which bodies may be seen as being related or symbolically connected to each other. This constitutes a reworking of Kaveny’s (2001) original definition which, when used within an analysis of cultural views on conjoined twins, denoted how these twins shared parts of their bodies.

5 Space

In order to examine another dimension of children’s agency, this chapter explores how twins draw on space as a resource for constructing and displaying identity. Following on from the previous discussion of parents’ decisions about bedroom space and school classes, it examines how twins utilise bedroom space and school space to mark out their identities and to variously reproduce, resist and modify cultural discourses of twinship. Space cannot be separated from identity. As embodied beings, we go about the process of building, establishing, validating and resisting various identities within and through specific spatial contexts. Throughout this chapter, then, the main concern will be to explore how twins negotiate the spatial contexts of togetherness and apartness to position and identify themselves in relation to the three main defining features of ‘twin’ identity: sameness, togetherness and closeness.

Bedroom space Children’s geographers have made a significant contribution to the New Social Studies of Childhood, examining spatial variations in childhood and how children construct and reconstruct their identities through space (Barker and Weller, 2003). However, the spatiality of childhood now constitutes a research theme across many other disciplines (apart from geography) such as sociology, anthropology, environmental psychology and media and communication studies (for instance, see Skelton and Valentine, 1998). Amongst other things, researchers have explored how children are controlled and regulated in and through space and how children actively negotiate their own autonomy, resist 119

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adult power and appropriate spaces as their own (see Childress, 2004; Holloway and Valentine, 2000a, 2000b). Within this broad interdisciplinary field of ‘childhood studies’, the focus has tended to be on the spaces of the ‘home’, ‘street’, school and play spaces. Relatively little attention has been paid to children’s use and appropriation of bedroom space specifically (see Edwards et al., 2005 for a sociological consideration of this). This has tended to be the province of ‘cultural studies’ where, partly as a reaction against the male-dominated focus on boys’ subcultural styles (Valentine et al., 1998), researchers have explored how girls use their bedroom spaces for leisure pursuits, to consume and display consumer goods, and express and practise particular identities (for instance, see James, 2001; Larson, 1995; Lincoln, 2005; McRobbie, 1991; McRobbie and Garber, 1976; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2002). The latter point has scope for informing an analysis of twins’ use of space as a resource for displaying and constructing their own identities.

Bedrooms and identities Drawing on the work of Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (2002), bedroom space is here theorised as an ‘identity text’ which both conveys and contains messages and meanings about who we are.1 Although, as we have already seen, parents structure this space in various ways, showing how matrices of power are mapped in and reflected through space (Foucault, 1984), children also actively create it as a meaningful place and use it to identify themselves and each other in various ways. Through a process of ‘mapping’, twins use objects to mark out their identities and may transform ‘external’ meanings produced by parents (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2002: 120). Space, then, is integral to ‘identity work’. As Massey states, ‘the construction of spatiality can be an important element in building a social identity’ (Massey, 1998: 128). Rather than merely providing a backdrop for social action, space is integral to the construction and reconstruction of identities (Valentine, 2001: 4). As we will see, by displaying their identities in and through bedroom space, twins attempt to both convey a sense of who they are (and are not) and map out and achieve a sense of their own separateness and distinctness. This notion of ‘display’ is important because it captures a sense in which identities may be ‘put on show’ through space. In her paper ‘Displaying families’, Finch (2007) adds this term to the sociological toolbox used to investigate family practices. She notes how this concept draws attention to how

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the practising of identity is a social process: something which has to be communicated to an audience, refuted and validated. This notion of display therefore draws attention to the active role that children take in showing off their own identities as part of the internal-external dialectic of identification. In exploring bedroom space, this chapter draws heavily on the notion of ‘boundary’. Cohen (1985) pointed towards the centrality of this concept in constructing a sense of community. Although Cohen has now criticised some of his own theorising in The Symbolic Construction of Community, his work remains important for helping us think about the importance of symbolic boundaries in constructing and maintaining identities. While groups may use physical boundaries to partition themselves off from each other, they may also construct symbolic boundaries that provide a sense of belonging and are expressed and maintained through social interaction. In Cohen’s words, the ‘consciousness of community is, then, encapsulated in perception of its boundaries which are themselves largely constituted by people in interaction’ (1985: 13). Emotions about place are therefore also linked with identity: we may identify with a particular place (feeling that we ‘belong’) and we may identify against a place (contrasting ourselves with somewhere we feel is very different from us) (Rose, 1995: 89, 92). In this chapter, we see how twins use space to give physical expression to the symbolic boundaries they create between and using each other, and thus to convey the points at which the self begins and ends.

‘Mapping’ identity in the bedroom In the preface to her book In My Room, Salinger (1995) notes that ‘[o]ur bedrooms tell stories about us. They become the repository for our memories and the expression of our desires and self-image’. Reflecting trends across Europe (Bovill and Livingstone, 2001), the children in this study saw their bedrooms as places which reflected their individuality. For instance, Peter told me: Peter: Your clothes are seen to … Your drawings and your clothes and your room, whatever, seems to, well your surroundings seem to reflect your personality. Posters, toys, tapes, CDs, videos and decor provided clues about personal tastes and interests and the role of popular culture in shaping them. For example, the walls of Charlotte and Hannah’s room were plastered with

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posters of their favourite pop stars, displaying their current likings for particular (predominantly male) pop idols. These posters existed in the same space as the teddies they had since childhood. Thus, as Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002) and Salinger (1995) also found, it seems that bedroom space is a space of transitional identity where past, present and future identities merge. In part, this may well be due to the fact that other household spaces are deemed inappropriate for containing such objects. Toys may be cleared away from the lounge or dining room to create ‘adult’ spaces. Bedrooms thus become hoarding grounds for children’s toys, makeup, magazines and computer games, objects that map out the trajectory of time’s passage. In Charlotte and Hannah’s room, it was the posters that dominated the space and greeted the onlooker’s eye. In this sense, it was their knowledge of and participation in ‘teenage’ popular culture that was pushed to the foreground of this display. For Ash and Harry (aged eight), elements of their early ‘childhood’ were packaged away for them by their parents. Toys were consigned to the wardrobe and teddies stuffed under their bunk beds. In this way, their bedroom space was transformed into an ‘age appropriate’ space and was used by their parents to display their children’s ‘developmental’ progression. This was particularly evident when their mother Clare explained her future decorating plans: Clare: Well we haven’t decorated yet because you said you want Harry Potter on don’t you? And I say, ‘no, we’re not having Harry Potter on, we’re having grown-up wall paper!’ Although Ash and Harry’s parents controlled the overall arrangement and design of their bedroom space, in one sense, they resisted the pressure to demonstrate that they were ‘growing up’ by drawing on elements of this childhood culture to exhibit their different interests. Having been given the opportunity to choose their own bedspreads, Ash used this to signify his interest in Digimon,2 while Harry illustrated his liking of Harry Potter.3 Yet, alongside this, they also demonstrated their valuing of individuality. Harry would have ideally liked this expression of individuality to be reflected in the decor of their room: Harry: You can just do Harry Potter wallpaper here [the wall next to his bunk] so I can see it and then you do normal wallpaper all around. … You could put Digimon things around the top [next to Ash’s bunk]. In Harry’s suggestion, this distinction between Harry/Harry Potter and Ash/Digimon is clear-cut and does not give any indication of overlapping

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interests. This is interesting given that, throughout the interviews, both Harry and Ash said they liked Harry Potter. In this example, then, Harry reveals the creative power of bedroom space in simplifying and signifying identity. Bedroom space may be used to conceal ambivalence and ambiguity, to trim off the rough edges and firm up the boundary between the self and Other. Although at eight years old, Ash and Harry may not have been permitted to transform such ideals into reality, Liam and Dan (aged 17) had more control over the choice of bedroom decor: Liam: Dan’s got kind of a Japanese look. Dan: Mine’s kind of more laid back. Kate: Go on then tell me – yours is decorated [to Liam]? Dan: His is very modern and– Liam: Black and white stripes, white walls and this kind of wall design. It’s actually completely different cos I’ve got more London-ey, kind of modern. Dan: And mine’s … Liam: His is completely East Oriental Buddha [inaudible]. Dan: It’s more, it’s yeah, quite quiet. By impressing their tastes and personalities into their bedroom space, twins actively transform these spaces into places. Here, place is defined as ‘space to which meaning has been ascribed’ (Carter et al., 1993: xii). Geographers often talk about a ‘sense of place’ to capture how ‘places are infused with meaning and feeling’ (Rose, 1995: 88). Space therefore becomes place when it has become ‘somewhere’. Importantly, however, the twins’ identities were not simply located inside the space of the bedroom, but also stretched far beyond it. For example, Hannah and Charlotte’s posters and Harry and Ash’s bedspreads connected them to the broader worlds of teenage and childhood culture. This notion of place is therefore also a ‘progressive notion of place’ (Massey, 1994) in the sense that it acknowledges how the micro and macro ‘scales’ of social life are linked together.

The enabling and constraining spatial context of the ‘single’ room Although it is often said that identical twins are more likely to have experience of sharing a bedroom than non-identical twins (Kozlak, 1978; Loehlin and Nichols, 1976; Richardson, 1998), all the twins I spoke to said they had experienced sharing a room at some point. Of those twins

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still living at home, Ian and Peter, Liam and Dan, and Rebecca and Andrea were now in different rooms at the time of interview. Having ‘separate’ rooms can offer children the opportunity to locate expressions of individuality within a bounded space. As Sibley (1995: 131) notes, ‘when a child has been given its own bedroom, then the space may be appropriated, transformed and the boundaries secured by marking that space as its own’. In line with this, research with (singleton) siblings has found that having one’s own room can be crucial in developing a sense of personal autonomy (Edwards et al., 2005: 18). Related to this, it can also help children assert their authority over the use of objects contained within it. McNamee’s (1998, 1999) study of children’s access to and use of computers within the home suggests that ‘owning’ a room can help children to police access to the ‘shared’ computer placed within it. For the twins in my study, having one’s own room allowed them to characterise the entire space as their own, and secure property as their own. As Ian (aged 13) said, ‘now we [don’t] share a room, we’ve got like our own stuff and we can like keep our own stuff safe’. The ‘single’ room thus creates and affirms ‘individual’ ownership and acts as a container for the unique self; a self that can be protected and maintained though its physical separation from the Other. This being the case, ‘owned’ objects often flowed freely between the twins’ different bedrooms. For example, Peter kept some of his juggling equipment in Ian’s room, while Dan had many of Liam’s CDs in his room. All these twins also talked about visiting each other’s rooms to spend time together. Entry in and out of each other’s rooms was not heavily policed, as Liam and Dan explained: Liam: I just walk in his room and I think when I’m downstairs he’s in my room. Dan: Rummaging about trying to find something. Liam: But I don’t really get too bothered unless he’s got a project to be in by the next morning, then he gets like [impersonating Dan] ‘get out!’ Although there is a definite notion of ‘my’ room and ‘his’ room, this individual space is not always closed off to one’s fellow twin. On the contrary, movement takes place across this boundary so that ‘his stuff’ might be located in ‘my room’. The exception to this rule emerges when Dan needs to concentrate on his studies. At this point, when

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privacy is demanded, this space is closed down and Liam becomes a ‘space invader’. This resonates with Barth’s (1969) conclusion that symbolic boundaries between different social groups persist, despite a flow of interaction across them. According to him, it is precisely because interaction occurs across the boundary that differences can be judged, stereotyped and transformed into points of differentiation. Thus, rather than encouraging ‘assimilation’, this movement helps to act out difference in everyday life. Hence, whilst twins and the objects they ‘own’ may step over on to the other side of the boundary, this does not necessarily undermine the distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, ‘me’ and ‘you’, self and Other. It could, in fact, help to bring this distinction into sharper focus. When ‘my’ CD is in ‘your’ room, I have the spatial coordinates for where I end and you begin. The sense of ‘separateness’ (which the ‘single’ room conveys) seems to both enable twins to secure property and space as their own and make them feel at ease about loaning their ‘owned’ objects out. Growing up, moving out The significance attributed to such ‘personal space’ increases as twins grow older: Kate: What did you think to sharing a room? Dan: It didn’t really bother me until– Liam: Later on. Dan: Later on when you’re kind of getting older. Liam: [Talks over Dan] and you want your own space. Dan: You want your own space yeah erm, up ’til then it– Liam: It was fine for when we were growing up. Dan: It was just normal. Liam: … But when you’re out of there do you know what I mean? You’re just a few years bigger and you think I need space to do stuff. ‘Getting out’ of childhood means getting out of the shared room. Dan’s point of view became even clearer when he spoke with me alone: Dan: I think you … I think you become … Whereas from a young age you’re quite similar, you’re the same age, you’re twins and you kind of have roughly the same interests and that and I think,

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as you get older you change don’t you? And so you start wanting different things and you can’t really, you can’t really, both people can’t be happy if we’re both living in the same space. Such accounts closely resemble the accounts given by some of the parents in Chapter 3 and, as such, point to how parental narratives can potentially characterise children’s own explanations. Space, so the story goes, is required as twins grow older in order to make room for the developing individual. As Dan clearly points out, the shared room is associated with ‘being a twin’ and having the same interests; however, the movement into ‘separate’ rooms marks the ‘natural’ transition out of twinship towards becoming an autonomous, independent and unique person. Of course, there is no reason to think that this desire for ‘space’ is specific to twins. As Chapter 2 showed, this movement towards independence constitutes part of our cultural normative timetable of ‘growing up’. Indeed, previous research emphasises the importance of ‘space’ for older children (Larson, 1995). However, this may take on added significance for twins, who want to pronounce their individuality and independence in the face of stereotypes that largely undermine this. Moving back home As an adult who returned back to the family home after living with her partner, Andrea was adamant that her parents acknowledge her need for a separate space where she could practise her adult status: Andrea: […] I wanted my own room. And that’s why I moved out the second time. And then when I came back, it was the condition I came back that I’d have my own bedroom for my own space. Kate: That was the condition was it? Andrea: Yeah. Kate: So you told … Andrea: Mum’d say ‘come back’ and I’d say, ‘I’ll come back but I don’t want to share a room again. I want my own room wi[th] my own things. I need my own wardrobe, I need it decorating how I want it decorating’. For Andrea, the prospect of retreating into a former state of togetherness was unthinkable. Having her ‘own space’ was now necessary if she was

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to be acknowledged as an autonomous individual who had her own property and her own tastes. This space, then, like her self, had to be bounded and personalised. Practising autonomy, establishing privacy Being in different rooms could also provide twins with the opportunity to act out autonomy and self-determination. For example, Liam told me that Dan was ‘always working in his room’ and explained how he used his own room to read, listen to CDs and play his drum kit. Similarly, Ian and Peter explained how having separate rooms allowed them to practise their own musical instruments without the sounds clashing. Peter told me that if they practised in the same room, ‘mine would over-power Ian’s sound’. Within the walls of the ‘single’ room, then, twins are not obliged to take their fellow twin into account and can therefore activate their own choices without them having to be negotiated with their fellow twin. Alongside this, being in separate rooms could also offer twins an opportunity to develop privacy from their twin siblings. A door could potentially be closed or locked: ‘I just walk in shut the bedroom door and I’m in there on my own’ (Andrea, aged 23). Closing the bedroom door could offer an opportunity to participate in ‘backstage’ behaviour (Goffman, 1969) which may, if revealed in public, be frowned upon. Twins may therefore utilise the single room when they feel that they need to be alone. Here, personal feelings can be contained within a personal space. In Liam’s words, one can ‘sulk’ and let feelings ‘boil up inside’. Solitude offers a space for private reflection, where fears, pressures and worries can be internally discussed and experienced. As Larson points out: Rather than being merely the absence of people, aloneness becomes recognised as an experiential niche providing valuable personal opportunities for emotional self-regulation and cultivation of the private self (Larson, 1995: 541). The single room could also offer some escape from adult power. Liam explained how Dan retreated to his own room when he thought his parents were treating him unfairly. However, importantly, such ‘freedom’ was not absolute. On the contrary, many of the children explained how parents still managed these ‘private’ spaces by telling them to tidy and clean their rooms or by cleaning their rooms for

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them. As Olivia put it, ‘Mum keeps the room tidy for us’. Her brother Adam told me, ‘Mum always wants me to be ready by eight o’clock for school, not leave my clothes on the floor’. Hannah explained how she tidied her room up in order to try to get permission to go out: ‘I’ll say to my mum, “well I’ve tidied my bedroom” and she’ll say, “well your bedroom should be tidy anyway”.’ Liam also explained how although he had a range of chores to do around the home, ‘the main one’s just like feed the dog and clean our rooms and that’. Girlfriends and boyfriends Personal space away from one’s twin was especially valued when entertaining girlfriends or boyfriends. As Liam said: ‘you begin to have girlfriends and that and you just want your own kind of space instead of being with Dan all the time.’ Liam thought that it would be ‘weird’ if he invited Dan to accompany him and his girlfriend: Liam: […] If he had a girlfriend, I wouldn’t go out with him […] when I’ve got my girlfriend, he doesn’t come out with me. Kate: Right. Liam: Unless he’s got something to gain from it. Like if I’m going into town he’ll come along and he’ll go off on his own. It’s a bit weird when you start ‘come Dan let’s go, me and my girlfriend’. Not only could this scenario (of them both spending time together with Liam’s girlfriend) potentially raise concern over the limits of their closeness (that is, fears of incest), it could also raise concern over their abilities to be independent. The absence of one’s fellow twin therefore momentarily confirms the overriding importance being attributed to heterosexual intimacy (over and above twin closeness) and, linked to this, asserts that one’s twin is not fulfilling this ‘romantic’ role. This separate space took on added significance when partners began sleeping together, as Rebecca (aged 23) explained: Rebecca: I’ve only got a double bed in my room she ’int getting in that with me and Craig. I don’t think that’d work very well. Twins thus moved into these spaces to close off access to their fellow twin and uphold the privacy of their heterosexual relationships. However, this signified a reversal of the physical togetherness they often once shared in childhood:

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Rebecca: But we used to like get into each other’s bed on a night though, just for a cuddle […]. Sounds really really odd, but we like our backs being scratched a lot and like so we’d get in bed and we’d have a clock next to us and we’d actually time it for a minute. I’d scratch her back for a minute and then it’d be like my turn to scratch. Here, Rebecca is keen to point out the limits of this childhood intimacy by making clear that they only ‘cuddled’. Alongside this, she also shows her commitment to normative life course timetables by explaining how she has sacrificed this ‘innocent’ expression of closeness in favour of establishing sexual intimacy with her partner. Physical separation from one’s twin (into a ‘separate room’) is therefore also vital in signalling that as an individual (with no ties), twins are ready to be re-partnered. Once this has occurred, partners may take on some of the roles that the twin once took. Sally explained how she and her twin sister used to grunt at each other: Sally: […] We used to go ‘mm’ like that, just go ‘mm’ in our sleep and the other one had to reply with like a grunt as well. And if the other one didn’t reply you kept doing it until the other one did because you didn’t want to think that one had fallen asleep before you. As an adult now sleeping with a boyfriend instead of her sister, she substitutes her partner to replace her twin: Sally: […] If I stay over at his I don’t want him to go to sleep before me. And I’ll prod him actually [laughs]. But I told him about what I did with my sister and I said, ‘can you just some nights, if I do make that [grunty] noise, just do it for me because it comforts me completely’. So that’s weird. It’s a really weird thing and it’s probably always stayed with me.

The enabling and constraining context of the shared room Ash and Harry, Emma and Ruth, Hannah and Charlotte, and Adam and Olivia were all still sharing a room at the time of interview. Aside from Adam and Olivia, all these children were living in houses with three bedrooms. For some twins, then, space was limited: Emma and Ruth, like Charlotte and Hannah, had another sibling still living at home,

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so all the bedrooms were occupied. Thus, as Jess and Massey (1995: 134) remind us, ‘[i]t is people themselves who make places, but not always in circumstances of their own choosing’. Older child twins who lived together in one room had to develop alternative ways of securing their individuality and independence. Much of the research conducted in relation to children’s bedroom space assumes that children have their own room, a focus which must in part reflect the European trend for children to have their own rooms (Bovill and Livingstone, 2001). However, given this, it may form conclusions that might not resonate with some twins’ experiences. To begin with, the twins often identified sharing as one feature of twinship, a feature which the older children, certainly in relation to their bedroom space, often wanted to escape from. As Andrea (aged 23) noted, sharing signifies that ‘you’re one person’. In line with this, Emma explained that this was part of being treated ‘the same because we are twins’; in their written accounts of what life would be like if they weren’t twins, Ruth and Hannah pinpointed this as a defining feature of twinship: If I wasn’t a twin […] We wouldn’t have to share as much stuff (Hannah, aged 15). If I wasn’t a twin I would be able to have my room all to myself and I wouldn’t have to share anything (Ruth, aged 13). Sharing a room may offer different opportunities and limitations to twins’ identity work. Summarising the opportunities that the (single) teenager’s bedroom can provide, Lincoln states: It is a room that provides respite from the public world, from the demands of peers, siblings and parents, in which unmediated activities such as sleeping, reading books and magazines, daydreaming and ‘chilling out’ take place (2004: 96). In contrast to this, twins who share a room may find it difficult to do exactly as they please. Indeed, many of the older children and adults drew attention to the limits this ‘shared’ space placed upon their capacity to action self-determined choices. Thinking back to when he moved from the ‘shared’ room, Liam (aged 17) said: Liam: […] I think it was the right time to kind of change and erm … cos I wanted my own space. I think Dan definitely wanted his own

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space. […] I’d like be watching TV he’d ‘I want to watch something else’ like that, and then there’d be like er, I’d be like reading a book and I’ll have the light on and he goes ‘I want to go to sleep, turn the light off’. And it was just silly things like that and you think ‘I need my own room really’. Andrea’s retrospective account practically mirrors this: Andrea: […] but then as we got older and you want to do your own thing … I’d come in maybe at a different time and go to bed cos I was always like the quiet one but she’d come in been to pub, turn the light on, want to read. I’m like, ‘turn the light off!’, ‘no I’m reading’. ‘Well it’s really selfish. I’ve got to be up for work.’ ‘No I’m reading.’ Like Andrea (aged 23) and Liam, twin sisters Charlotte and Hannah (aged 15) both reported difficulty in negotiating their different sleeping patterns: Hannah: If she fancies someone … She goes on about this one lad for weeks on end and I’m trying to get to sleep on a night and she’s going on about him. Charlotte: I go to bed earlier than Hannah so when she comes in we start arguing. Importantly, increasing autonomy, here associated with growing up, is seen to make this shared living arrangement difficult to manage. Through their demands (‘turn the light off’) and arguments, these twins struggle to assert their own autonomy and to regulate and control the space they share. The following discussion takes a closer look at how the twins managed and negotiated the space of their shared bedrooms. Naming and claiming sides of the room Many of the older children who were still sharing a room territorialised space, marking it out as ‘yours’ or ‘mine’. Ruth and Emma (aged 13) and Charlotte and Hannah (aged 15) split their rooms into two sides, which were named and claimed. Thus, Emma had her side and Ruth hers. Charlotte had her side and Hannah hers. By naming and claiming space as their own, by positioning objects in space to mark out this divide and by trying to protect and defend their spaces from invasion,

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these twins both created and activated different ‘zones’ of space: ‘her’ space and ‘my’ space. Lincoln notes: a zone is a physical and visible arrangement of furniture, technical equipment, beauty product, school books, in fact any item that is ‘contained’ within the bedroom space. It is orientated by the social activities that take place within the space (2004: 97, references excluded). A zone is therefore a physical space that can be marked out by particular objects as well as by the actual use of the zoned space. By creating these ‘zones’, twins give physical expression to the process of Othering: I am not you and you are not me. Emma’s picture of her bedroom (see Figure 5.1) shows how these ‘zones’ were created. Here the alcove, which she re-names the ‘big division’, is the divider that splits the room into two (named) sides. The significance of this divide is made clear in Emma’s picture. By re-titling the ‘little division’ as the ‘big division’, Emma literally extends the gap between the two sides of room. In doing this, she also draws attention to the significance of and the vastness of their separateness, something which serves to contravene stereotypical assumptions that twins are ‘joined at the hip’. Indeed, by naming different sides of the room, Emma marks out their different ‘spaces of belonging’ (Morley, 2001: 425): I belong here; this side belongs to me. Interestingly, the beds are pushed to the far edges of the room, and no objects drawn in the middle of the room, serving to intensify the polarity of this divide.

Figure 5.1

‘My bedroom’ – by Emma, aged 13 (pseudonyms added)

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Beds as symbols of separateness Beds were also ‘named and claimed’. They were always individually owned and never claimed as ‘shared’ space. The latter would contravene the very cultural (incest) taboo that these ‘single’ and ‘separate’ beds give physical expression to. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, twins sometimes named their beds in the pictures they drew of their bedrooms, thereby marking out where these named selves could be located and contained. Hence, in both Adam’s picture (see Figure 5.2) and Emma’s picture (see Figure 5.1), there is certainly no sense that these beds are shared or interchangeable. As Newson points out, one’s own bed constitutes the ‘most basic “personal space”’ (cited in O’Brien, 1995: 510). For those twins who wanted to ‘name and claim’ their different sides of the room, beds could be useful symbolic markers. While the physical shape of their bedrooms may have been conducive to creating a physical boundary, it was the positioning of the beds in relation to this boundary that effectively served to mark out space as ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. For example, Emma’s picture shows how one bed was placed either side of the ‘big division’ to identify Emma’s side and Ruth’s side. Similarly, Sally remembered: ‘we used to have archways either side – she had a bed there [in one archway] and I had a bed there [in the other].’

Figure 5.2

‘My bedroom’ – by Adam, aged 16 (pseudonyms added)

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Although he was one of the youngest twins in the sample, Ash also named his own bed: Kate: Do you share a room or have you got your own room? Ash: We’ve got us– Harry: We share a room. Ash: I’ve got top bunk! However, unlike the older twins, Ash and Harry were sleeping in bunk beds and did not use their beds to mark out ‘sides’ of their bedroom. The appropriation and use of ‘shared’ objects Aside from beds, other objects within the shared room were also named and claimed by older children. Often bought and initially placed in the room by parents, TVs, hi-fis, CD players and videos could be momentarily identified as individually owned objects in order to mark out and affirm individual space. Thus, Hannah explained: ‘Charlotte’s TV’s on her side and I’ve got the CD player on my side.’ Although throughout the course of the interview, it emerged that Charlotte and Hannah shared the CD player and the TV, Hannah used them to mark out their different ‘sides’: because their spaces do not overlap, the TV becomes Charlotte’s and the CD player is identified with Hannah. Similarly, although Ruth admitted that the TV was ‘both of ours’, she still named it as her own: Ruth: Emma’s side is where the radio is so she likes to have the radio and my side’s near the window and I’ve got my own television but it’s like both of ours really. As can be the case in sibling relationships too, possessions are here used as symbols of separation (Edwards et al., 2005: 17). Importantly, these objects were also objects which both twins wanted access to in order to secure their own leisure activities and personal tastes. As such, usage had to be negotiated or fought over. Andrea remembered how she and her sister Rebecca used the ‘shared’ hi-fi when they shared a room: Andrea: Er … whoever got up first I suppose put what they wanted [on] and then the other would turn it off and put their’s on. So there were plenty of fights about it.

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In this scenario, Andrea and Rebecca both compete to get their music heard and thus to activate a sense of having (superior) rights to this object. Power, rather than being located in one particular twin, is contested, undermined and actively resisted. Aided by the presence of another TV in the house, Charlotte and Hannah reached a slightly more amicable agreement over using the ‘shared’ TV in their bedroom: Charlotte: She watches some quiz shows and I don’t like stuff like that. Kate: You don’t? Hannah: It’s too hard for her! Charlotte: [Laughs] Kate: So what happens then? Charlotte: I go downstairs and watch it and she stays up here. Charlotte thus exits their bedroom, leaving Hannah alone to use the ‘shared’ TV. Protecting personal property: keeping things in their place Twins also sometimes tried to contain their own property within their own spaces. Hence, Andrea explained how she kept her things in ‘her’ bottom two drawers, Olivia how she kept her own clothes in ‘her’ cupboard and Rachel how she kept her things on her own shelf. Hannah also told me how they both sometimes policed the spaces of their beds: Hannah: […] She goes mad though if I sit on her bed. Kate: Right. Hannah: She goes ‘get on your own bed!’ Kate: Why do you think that is? Hannah: Don’t know. Kate: … Does it matter if she sits on yours? Hannah: Yeah, I tell her to get off it. Kate: Why? Hannah: Cos it’s my side. Here, beds are guarded and protected to ensure that the boundary between self and Other (which these beds give physical expression to) is not transgressed or blurred. In this sense, twins act out and try to maintain the clarity of this divide between ‘my’ space and ‘your’ space.

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Where there is fear that this distinction will be undermined, twins may go to more extreme measures to ‘protect’ their belongings: Hannah: And I’ve put like, had to put a lock on some of my stuff so she can’t get to it and use it, cos she always like uses it so there’s hardly any left for me. She just like comes and nicks my make up and stuff. So I’ve got a lock on it so she can’t use it and hid the keys. By placing her property under lock and key, Hannah tries to guard it from being used by her twin sister Charlotte. Certainly, in one sense, knowing where one’s things are located helps to police and manage any potential invasions: Andrea: But if she went to a drawer there, if I saw her do it, I’d … ‘What you doin?’ ‘I’m borrowing your socks.’ ‘Well where’s yours?’ ‘Well I ‘ant got any’. ‘Well why?’ And it’d be like that, bit of interrogation. And she’d go, ‘oh please let me’ and I’d be, ‘oh alright then, oh yeah hang on’. Knowing that her socks were kept in that drawer, Andrea was able to quickly intercept her sister’s attempts to borrow her things. Although she may have agreed to loan this property out, this was not done unconditionally but after a ‘bit of interrogation’. Unstable boundaries Thus far, it is evident that twins can provide each other with valuable human resources to help them shore up a sense of individuality. Faced by the other twin, the other side of the room and the bed that does not belong to them, twins can obtain some sense of their own individual distinctiveness and separateness. Yet, although some twins actively tried to firm up the boundaries between themselves and their fellow twin, these boundaries were not impermeable or fixed. Rather, they were unstable, changeable and could be momentarily transgressed and undermined. Firstly, it is important to note that this shared space changed shape. As we have already seen, ‘shared rooms’ may become ‘separate’ rooms when children ‘grow up’. ‘Open’ spaces (a separate room that one’s twin can enter freely) may also be closed down when privacy is required. However, on an even smaller scale, objects within the room may be relocated and identities shifted accordingly. For example, Ruth and Emma said they had sometimes swapped beds when they

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had become bored with their present arrangement. Hence, ‘her’ bed now becomes ‘my’ bed. Identities, therefore, are not timeless and static, forever tied into particular places (one particular bed) (Massey, 1994: 5). Secondly, the shared bedroom presents twins with a paradox: two places exist within one room. As such, objects from the ‘other’ side of the room may temporarily creep across the boundary that divides the two sides up. Many of the twins complained about their shared rooms being messed up by their fellow twin. For instance, Ruth explained how Emma’s side of the room sometimes became her concern: ‘the problem with the side of Emma’s is that I always clean it! I always tidy it up.’ Here Ruth keeps her sister in check and takes over the management of her sister’s space when it becomes messy. In such everyday situations, the relatedness of these places is emphasised: ‘her’ place is part of ‘our’ room. However, by tidying her sister’s belongings up, Ruth also puts them back into their appropriate place, deals with any anomalies and reaffirms their status as ‘owned’ objects. Following Douglas (1966), this complaint can be interpreted as an objection against the blurring of symbolic boundaries and an attempt to ‘purify’ the distinction between them. Charlotte explained how this ‘clean up’ process could be achieved in practice: Charlotte: I put my stuff on her shelf. Kate: You put your stuff on her shelf? Charlotte: She just threw it on my bed so I’ll have to clean it up. By placing Charlotte’s ‘stuff’ on Charlotte’s bed, her sister Hannah relocates it firmly within Charlotte’s side of the room and cleans up the anomaly she has created, ready for her sister Charlotte to place the object back in its appropriate place. Finally, even where twins work hard to differentiate the shared space of the bedroom in order to display their status as individuals, this ‘identity text’ may not be read in the same way by other onlookers. Ellie’s account is revealing in this respect. As a sister to Charlotte and Hannah, it was their shared room and her single room which spatially and symbolically served to mark her out as different and her sisters out as ‘twins’ who spend their time together. Her explanation of what life would be like if she wasn’t a sister to twins (see Figure 5.3) makes this clear. Here the opposition between togetherness and loneliness runs parallel to the distinction between twinship and siblingship. Reflecting

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Figure 5.3 ‘What life would be like if I wasn’t a sister to twins’ – by Ellie, aged 12

the ‘continuum of siblingship’ outlined in Chapter 2, twins come in pairs and go together, while sisters are on their own without a partner. Charlotte and Hannah are pictured as almost identical stick figures and set in opposition to Ellie, who looks different from them. The phrase ‘2 gether’ draws attention to the twoness of twinship (both in terms of twin sameness and in terms of twin togetherness) and quite literally connects the two figures together, filling the space in between their bodies. In contrast, Ellie’s loneliness surrounds the space around her body, only serving to emphasise that there is no one else there. While Charlotte and Hannah are happy to be together, Ellie is sad not to be with them. For Ellie, the shared room affirms that her sisters belong together and helps mark her out as an outsider, a status that is further confirmed through being allocated to a single room. This partitioning of space also made Ellie feel ‘left out’: Kate: […] If you could tell me how you sort of experience your family life … being here with your mum and your twin sisters.

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Ellie: Well like, my sist– like Hannah and Charlotte have got each other, share a bedroom and that. But like when I’m feeling a bit left out, my mum like chats with me and she says we’re just like twins. And like when my sisters are having a go at me, then my mum will have a go at them and she’ll back me up. Although here mum tries to become Ellie’s twin to make the groups quantitatively and qualitatively equal, from Ellie’s point of view, her twin sisters still have something that she does not have: each other. For Ellie, this is a vital part of being a twin: ‘if you’re a twin you have each other.’ Thus, although twins may try to redefine this space and through it themselves, it is questionable as to how far these definitions are accepted and validated by others. As we have seen here, the presence of other siblings located in ‘single’ rooms may help to bring their twinship into view. Twins themselves could also undermine each other’s bid to establish themselves as self-contained and bounded individuals by stealing objects from each other without permission. In contrast to many of the reported experiences given by twins living in separate rooms, objects did not often flow freely between the twins. With no bounded space to close the door on, objects became important markers of owned space and were vital in providing twins with a sense of felt individuality and separateness from one’s twin. As Raffaelli argues, ‘possessions are integral to self definition’ and therefore disputes over ownership may reflect ‘issues of self definition and personal boundaries’ (Raffaelli, 1992: 660). Conflict and arguments As was the case with borrowing clothes, the same-sex female twins sometimes spoke about the arguments they would have when personal property was taken without permission and when they fought over the use of ‘shared’ objects. We have already seen evidence of this when Andrea and Rebecca competed to use their ‘shared’ hi-fi and when Hannah explained how she had to lock up her makeup to prevent Charlotte from using it. Charlotte’s picture (see Figure 5.4) of what it was like to be a twin at home positioned this conflict at the centre of her experience. This, so Charlotte explained to me, simulates an argument over ‘who’s took each other’s stuff’. Here we see both twins competing to assert their authority: Charlotte tells Hannah to ‘shut up’ and Hannah resists obedience by asserting her own authority. In everyday life, arguments over taking each other’s ‘stuff’ seemed to be resolved quickly, revealing the relative permanency of the sibling bond (Edwards et al., 2006; Punch,

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Figure 5.4

‘Being a twin’ – by Charlotte, aged 15

Figure 5.5

‘Being a twin’ – by Hannah, aged 15

2008b). As Emma told me, ‘It’s never lasted more than a day though. We always make friends at the end of the day’. Similarly, Sally remembered, ‘we wouldn’t be cross with each other for very long which baffled me’. Sociological analyses of siblingship have found that the familiarity that siblings have of each other and the time and space which they share within the family home can be a source of irritation (Punch, 2008b). When I asked Hannah to draw a picture of what it was like to be a twin, she said, ‘Can I just like draw me pulling my hair out or sommat?’ (see Figure 5.5).

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When I asked her to explain why she was pulling her hair out, she told me, ‘Just erm sharing a bedroom with her. I get all stressed’. Having shared a room all their lives, Emma and Ruth both wanted some opportunity to keep themselves to themselves. Ruth explained how they intended to achieve this: ‘we’re going to have a wardrobe that can split [the room] as well [as the alcove] so you don’t always see each other.’ Through such acts of concealment, twins may be able to obtain some physical privacy (for instance, to change their clothes without being seen) and ‘information control’ (Goffman, 1969). Through not being seen, they may be able to monitor the information they give off about themselves and thus the knowledge their fellow twin has of them. In the midst of arguments, twins can feel frustrated. Hannah explained, ‘I just want to go and be on my own somewhere’. However, the shared room offers little comfort in this respect. As she told me, ‘if I’m upstairs, she could just like come upstairs and I’d get stressed even more’. Hannah thus required a space where she could experience her inner feelings in physical isolation from her sister. Feeling that she had nowhere to go, she occasionally sat in the bathroom because, as she explained, ‘there’s a lock on [the door] and no one can get in’. Closing, securing and guarding the door literally shuts off outside access and any potential invasions. Although they had another younger sibling, Ellie, Charlotte and Hannah preferred not to spend time with her at home and sometimes felt embarrassed when she invaded their bedroom: Charlotte: Say we’ve got our mates here, [Ellie] comes in here and sits on the bed. Kate: Right. Hannah: But we tell her to get out. Kate: How come? Hannah: Cos she just starts acting cocky. Such scenarios are common amongst teenagers, who are keen to shore up a sense of being more ‘grown up’ than their younger sibling(s) (Edwards et al., 2006: 51, 82). Being three years their junior, Ellie carries the potential stigma of ‘childishness’ and this, from Charlotte and Hannah’s point of view, makes her an inappropriate escape route from physical togetherness. In line with their need to secure their own space, the older female twins who still shared a room also explained how they often spent time

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apart from each other outside of the home. Charlotte explained that now, in high school, they had different friends and spent less time together than they used to: ‘I go out with my friends and she goes out with her friends.’ Similarly, Hannah said that ‘we don’t like hanging around with the same people’ and recounted how she spent time with her own friends at discos and in town. Emma and Ruth also explained why (before they moved house) they never really saw very much of each other: Emma: Well … at our old house I always used to go out after school so I never used to see much of Ruth. Ruth: And I just used to stay in all the time and help my mum and dad so … Making space for twinship In contrast, some twins valued being together in the shared bedroom and at home and thus, rather than wanting to escape this dimension of twinship, actively wanted to participate in it. This was especially prevalent for the youngest twins in the study. Although Ash and Harry named and claimed their toys, these were used as resources for activating and practising twin togetherness: Harry: I’ve got Harry Potter [Lego] at this end [of the room]. Kate: Who plays with this then? Just you? Harry: Sometimes my brother plays with me … and I got tons of it upstairs. In contrast to many of the older child twins who still shared a room, they did not attempt to create bounded, named zones and thus distance themselves from notions of twin togetherness. On the contrary, togetherness formed a central part of Ash’s depiction of what it was like to be a twin at home (see Figure 5.6). Here Ash and Harry are pictured playing on the ‘shared’ Playstation together in their bedroom. Ash identified this aspect of togetherness as what makes being a twin special: Kate: Do you think that being a twin is anything special or anything different? Ash: Special. Harry: Yeah. Special.

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‘Being a twin’ – by Ash, aged eight

Kate: Why is it special? Ash: Cos you’ve got someone to play with, be in your clubs, play with you on your Playstation […]. When asked what life would be like if he wasn’t a twin, Ash said it would be ‘horrible’ because he would have ‘no one to play with’. Similarly, his brother Harry drew a picture of a sad face (see Figure 5.7). Explaining his point of view, Harry said: Harry: I’m going to put sad. Kate: Why would you be sad then? Harry: Cos you’ve got no one to play with except mum and dad but they don’t play with you. And you won’t have no one to talk to […]. Cultural constructions of the ‘home’ and ‘childhood’ provide the backdrop for this aspect of twin experience. As Chapter 2 pointed out, the process of Western industrialisation saw children removed from paid work and placed in the domestic realms of the home and the school. Indeed, the ideological meanings of ‘childhood’ and ‘the home’ have become mutually constitutive, each being defined in and through the other. Whilst childhood is a state of innocence, the home is a safe haven where this innocence can be protected and maintained. As such, it is a ‘safe place’ where love and protection can flourish (Valentine, 2001: 63). Conceived in this way, the ‘public’ world (for instance, ‘the street’, ‘the city’) is conceptualised as potentially dangerous and disruptive. Epitomised through the fear of ‘stranger danger’, life outside the home represents unfamiliarity, risk, threats of violence and harm and,

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Figure 5.7

‘What life would be like if I wasn’t a twin’ – by Harry, aged eight

as such, something that children should be protected from (Jenks, 2005; Valentine, 1996). In line with this, Ash (aged eight) told me that his brother would ‘spend more time with me cos we’re stuck in [the] house all day’. His choice of wording here implies a lack of control: he is stuck at home rather than choosing to be there. Indeed, his dad Anthony explained: ‘I don’t let ‘em go and play out on street do we? Owt like that.’ Their parents, Clare and Anthony, offered two different explanations for this, but both reflected their concern to protect their children from harm (which lay outside of the home): Anthony: Well they always want to go and play football on the street, well for me its not [the] right place cos if you kick a ball and it hits a car and it does some damage and you know. Clare: Plus there’s kids off, off rest of street and they all come and congregate here and I always think that if anything happens, it will be them two, they’ll take the blame instead of saying, ‘oh no, so and so’.

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Both scenarios imply that aspects of the ‘outside world’ are risky: whilst playing football could unintentionally cause damage, hanging around with the other kids off the street could ultimately mean that Ash and Harry ended up taking the blame for something. Cultural expectations of normative childhood may thus help to constitute twin togetherness. At eight years old, Ash and Harry’s actions are closely monitored by their parents who, as we saw in Chapter 3, want to keep them as children for as long as possible. Given that space is made for them to be together (both within the home in general and within the shared room more specifically) and they seem to have little power to exit from this, it is perhaps no surprise that they pinpoint togetherness as a key component of their experience of being twins. It may also be no surprise that this is represented as a positive experience since, certainly within the home setting, where parents value their togetherness and do not expect them to be completely independent of each other (see Chapter 3), there is little threat of social stigma. Togetherness therefore provides an opportunity for companionship and escape from being potentially ‘alone’.

Being together and being apart Thus far, then, it seems that we can draw a general distinction between the younger and older children, with the older children placing more emphasis on the value of being apart. As such, some of the older children who had moved into separate rooms saw this as an important part of ‘growing up’, whilst others who were still sharing a room noted their frustrations at still having to live together. In contrast, the youngest twins seemed to delight in being together. There were some notable exceptions and complexities, however, which need to be taken into account. Firstly, unlike the other older twins who shared a room, the different-sex twins seemed to have more in common with the youngest twins in terms of their valuing of togetherness at home and in the shared room more specifically. Secondly, some twins seemed more adamant about getting their own space. Thirdly, although some of the older twins talked about wanting their own space or the importance of having their own space, they also talked of the advantages of companionship and support.

The different-sex twins In some respects, it is difficult to explore the impact of gender on how the older child twins utilised the space of their rooms. Leaving aside

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the different-sex twins Adam and Olivia, it was the same-sex girls who shared a room (Emma and Ruth, and Charlotte and Hannah) and spoke extensively about this experience, and the same-sex boys who had their own rooms (Ian and Peter, and Liam and Dan). This allocation of rooms may, as has already been suggested, reflect their parents’ financial ability to provide enough space for their children to have their own rooms. The different-sex twins still shared a room despite their parents having a large enough house to accommodate their having different rooms and despite their parents’ previous attempts to separate them. These twins, unlike the other older children sharing a room, drew more attention to the advantages of being together in their room: Olivia: You don’t get lonely at night. There’s someone to talk to at night time. There’s always someone there just to keep you awake so … Adam: At Christmas time you can open your stocking together. Thinking back to what it was like when she was moved out into her own room, Olivia told me, ‘I just got really scared. I didn’t like it at all’. In her picture depicting what it is like to be a twin (see Figure 5.8), Olivia indicated four ‘happy’ experiences and one that contained ‘bad times’. The positive experiences were dominated by instances of playing together at home: playing badminton in the garden; playing with the Playmobil toys; playing games (like ‘I Spy’) in the shared bedroom. For Olivia, playing games like ‘I Spy’ seems to point to the positive value still invested in ‘sharing’ a room. However, in her narrative, Olivia moves between the past and present tense, identifying this activity both as part of her previous and current experience: Olivia: […] And then, we play I spy, we used to play that at night time and have giggles. Quite fun. And then we share our stocking; we wait for each other to open our stockings at nighttimes. Although she may be saying that they still play ‘I Spy’ now but not at night time, she may also be trying to situate this activity within her past childhood. She is certainly aware of the social pressure to ‘separate’: Olivia: […] I think it’s quite good if I go to boarding school so I can like … well just because I go to a boarding school I wouldn’t like move rooms but it’s quite good just to be on my own because we will eventually be on our, we’ll go to separate universities probably, so you know, we’ve got to try and like gradually get used to splitting up.

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Figure 5.8

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‘Being a twin’ – by Olivia, aged 16 (pseudonyms added)

Thus, while Olivia plays up the value of physical togetherness, she has a normative life course timetable in view. It is this timetable that threatens to position Adam and Olivia as (young) ‘children’. Indeed, although, as we saw in the previous chapter on the body, these different-sex twins may be less at risk of having their uniqueness undermined, there is still, as Olivia points out, a need to conform to the cultural ideal of independence.

Instigators and followers One further complexity was that some of the twins were more forthright in asserting their desire to move out of the shared room or foster

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a new, more independent living arrangement. These instigators were named with consistency. For example, although Rebecca and Andrea saw ‘separation’ as a ‘natural’ part of growing up, Rebecca often identified Andrea as the chief instigator of this ‘split’: it was Andrea who moved out of home (and the shared room) to live with her fiancé, leaving Rebecca alone to miss her not being there. As she explained, ‘I’ve just missed her when she’s moved away. […] I’ve missed her when she’s gone out and she’s gone and done things that she wants to do’. Likewise, Sally often identified Rachel as the leader of change and herself as the passive ‘follower’ caught up in it. According to her, Rachel ‘was the one who wanted to move out [of the shared room] which hurt me a lot initially cos I thought “I don’t want to move out, I want to share with my sister still”’. Similarly, Charlotte had more reservations about (hypothetically) moving into a ‘separate’ room than Hannah. Fearing that ghosts haunted the house, she valued the company her sister provided: Kate: So in an ideal world would you want separate rooms? Hannah: Yeah. Charlotte: Yeah but I don’t know actually cos we’ve got ghosts. I think I’d be scared to sleep in a bedroom on my own. As was the case in the previous chapter, it certainly seems that some twins would have perhaps indulged in more aspects of twinship (in this case togetherness) had their twin allowed it. What is interesting from these examples is that the named ‘instigator’ is also the older twin. Possibly, then, this power dynamic represents a bid on behalf of the older twins to practise, through these ‘bigger’ life course-related decisions, their status as both ‘older’ persons (who are further along the path towards adulthood) and as ‘bigger sisters’ who can exert some control over their younger siblings’ lives. However, we do have to be careful here. As Charlotte’s picture of ‘being a twin’ (see Figure 5.4) and Andrea’s earlier account of using the ‘shared’ hi-fi testify, during their everyday, more mundane dealings, power was not fixed in the hands of one or other of the twins, but was always open to contestation and resistance. Sibling relationships are therefore created, produced and maintained through everyday social interaction (Klett-Davies, 2008). Rather than being fixed, sibling relationships change shape and power relationships remain dynamic and fluid. Punch (2008a) acknowledges this in her research on siblings’ negotiations of birth order positions. As she notes, sibling roles have to be worked out and established during everyday

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social interaction. Being the ‘oldest’, for instance, does not give siblings unquestioned and automatic access to power. This power has to be practised and accepted. In reality, however, it is sometimes resisted by younger siblings.

Companionship and comfort Although some of the older twins valued living apart in separate rooms, they also explained that their twin siblings also sometimes provided companionship and support. For instance, Liam and Dan both felt that it was important to move into different rooms in order to practise their autonomy. However, as we saw earlier in this chapter, they often visited each other’s rooms and left their belongings in each other’s rooms. Indeed, these twins seemed to feel relatively more relaxed about spending time together than those older twins who were still sharing a room. Dan told me, ‘I think we both enjoy each other’s company a lot’. Both Liam and Dan saw each other as companions that got along well. Importantly, they both explained how they would provide each other with support by offering advice, protection and by helping each other out in difficult situations. Dan told me, ‘if he gets into some kind of trouble or something, I’ll always stick up for him’, and Liam told me, ‘if I’m in trouble he’ll try and stick up for me and if he’s in trouble, I’ll try and stick up for him’. Sometimes, if there was potential for them both to get into trouble with their parents, they would, in Liam’s words, ‘work together to get ourselves out of things’. In line with his characterisation of Dan as the ‘responsible’ twin, Liam also told me that Dan would provide him with moral advice: Dan would ‘tap me on the shoulder and he’d go “you shouldn’t have done that”’. Even though Charlotte and Hannah both seemed frustrated at sharing a room and talked about how they spent time apart from each other with their own friends, Charlotte, more than Hannah, identified some positive aspects to being a twin that included being together: Kate: In an ideal world would you choose to be twins or not? Charlotte: I think I would because like I think when you’re starting a new school, or you’re always with somebody you’re not on your own. Hannah: That’s the only good thing though. We’ve got to live with each other day in day out. And we’ve got to share most things. My mam got us that CD player for Christmas and we had to share it.

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Similarly, although Ruth and Emma played down the extent of time they spent together and actively worked to create their own spaces within the shared room, they still explained that they were presently relying on each other for company because they had just moved house: Ruth: Now we moved and our friends aren’t there, we’ll spend more time together. Emma: Yeah. We don’t know anyone round here. Ruth: Hmm. Emma: So we like stick together … erm … that’s about it. As this demonstrates, twins may move in and out of togetherness in different situations, revealing the ambivalence of their relationships with each other. In some situations, twins may value and even rely on each other for the companionship they provide. Rather than ‘splitting up’, twins may ‘stick together’ in times of need, even though they may also pronounce the advantages and need for having their ‘own space’. Ambivalence is, as Dunn notes, a characteristic of children’s sibling relationships. Thus, they encompass a mixture of feelings and functions ranging from intimacy, comfort and support to irritation and conflict (Dunn, 2008: 17). These themes are reflected in some of the twins’ accounts of their own experiences.

School space Having explored the spatial context of twins’ bedrooms, this chapter now turns to explore how they experienced being twins at school. Compulsory schooling constitutes an important component of childhood socialisation, providing children with cultural knowledge about how to become socially acceptable adults through both the formal and informal curriculum (James et al., 1998). As Chapter 3 also pointed out, the school is a site that both produces and is produced by social relations of power. ‘The school as a social institution is a setting where (obviously but) crucially, adult authority is more salient and less challengeable than at home’ (Mayall, 1994: 122). However, importantly, it is also a setting where children socialise each other and help to define each other’s identities. Ethnographic studies conducted within this setting have, amongst other things, examined the reproduction of children’s ‘culture’ (for example, Opie and Opie, 1977) and drawn attention to their capacity for agency (for example, Mayall, 1996) and their role in shaping their own and other children’s identities (for example, James, 1993).

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Unlike bedroom space, where twins are mainly either in the company of each other or on their own, school space forces twins to live out part of their daily lives in the public presence of many other children. Twins may spend varying degrees of time together and apart, depending on whether they are in the same classes, the same tutor groups (where registers are taken each morning) and, of course, the same school. All the twins in this study attended the same school as their twin sibling. The remaining parts of this chapter explore how twins negotiate their identities within these two spatial contexts of being together and being apart.

Being together On the one hand, being together at school could offer some comfort. For instance, Charlotte explained ‘we both like do our home work together if its hard or sommat or, starting school, you’re like in the same year, so you’re like not on your own’. On a less positive note, twins also spoke of the difficulties that being together at school held for them. For example, Olivia disliked the fact that her brother Adam could ‘tell’ on her to her parents. Being apart for some classes therefore had its advantages: Olivia: […] It’s nice to be [apart], like when Adam’s like away, and it’s like, when you’re in different classes, it’s quite nice cos you can like, you don’t have anything falling back at you at home […]. Togetherness thus meant a lack of privacy and freedom from twin surveillance in this context as well. While the temporary absence of one’s twin could provide some relief from this, twins may still be reminded of their ‘attachment’ to each other by other children and teachers at school. For instance, Liam explained how, being in the same tutor group as his brother Dan, some of the people in his group would ask after Dan if he was not at school: Liam: If Dan’s like ill and I go to school, we’ll be sat together in a morning just before registration, they’ll go ‘oh where’s Dan today?’ They’ll kind of, you know, everyone always comes up to me and goes, ‘oh what’s the matter with Dan, what’s he doing?’ And I’ll give them the usual spiel and the teachers will ask and they’ll transfer work to me and ‘give it to him’ sort of thing […].

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The togetherness of the youngest twins, Ash and Harry, was on display for all to see. They were in the same class at school and were known to be twins, therefore their togetherness could be viewed and linked to this identity. However, Harry sometimes distanced himself from this togetherness by sitting with his ‘own’ friends. As he explained, ‘I spend most of [my] time sitting next to my friends’. In contrast, Ash valued the comfort his brother brought and wanted to stay with him. Indeed, he experienced upset at not being picked by his brother to be in his team at school and tried to actively create new experiences of togetherness at break time. He told me, ‘normally I follow my brother about’. Placed within the same class, they had access to the same range of social contacts. However, just as Harry detached himself from Ash by sitting with his friends, so he also tried to differentiate himself as a uniquely known person by claiming Simon as ‘his’ friend: Kate: Do you have friends at school? Ash: Yeah. One of us, both of us have got the same friends or three. Darren, we used to both like him, Steven we both like him, and Simon. Kate: Who? Harry: Simon Slatter. He’s my friend. Ash: He’s his friend. He’s about [twists his hand from side to side to indicate an on-off movement] like that wi[th] me. Unlike Harry, Ash’s account of ownership is inconsistent, first stating that Darren, Steven and Simon belong to ‘one’ of them and then replacing this with the assertion that they belong to ‘both’ of them. This sequence seems to suggest that Ash is using his association with Harry in order to present himself as having friends and being a befriended person. His mum Clare suggests that ‘Ash hasn’t got friends really’. Therefore, listing these names could be one way in which Ash deals with his own social marginality. As James (1993) notes, children may list children’s names to create a sense of ‘having friends’ to develop a sense of belonging. While Ash looks to Harry for friends, Harry looks away from Ash towards his ‘own’ friends and uses these to spend some time away from Ash whilst being in the same class at school. Within this context, Harry instigates some expressions of differentiation. This is especially interesting given that, as we saw in previous section on bedroom space, Harry also said that he would be ‘sad’ if he was not

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a twin because he would have ‘no one to play with’. This suggests that within the spatial context of school, in and amongst other children, being apart takes on some social value. Hence, as the previous chapter also suggested, children may ‘sometimes experience competing understandings of how they should be producing the space of their bodies in different locations’ (Valentine, 2001: 40). As James (1993), notes, within the social world of other (primary) school children, it is the successful balance of individuality and conformity that increasingly carries potential for acquiring social capital. This means that children must learn how to become ‘one in the crowd’ (somebody unique) rather than ‘one among many in the crowd’ (socially anonymous) or one outside of the crowd (eccentric) (James, 1993: 151). In choosing to spend time with his friends, Harry plays down his valuing of twin togetherness and displays his willingness to establish friendships outside of the twin dyad. In doing so, he positions himself alongside the other kids at school who do not have a fellow twin to establish alternative relationships with. Being apart also provides Harry with an opportunity to perform some degree of difference and independence from his brother: he does not have to do everything that his brother does. Hence, by distancing himself from his twin, he is able to draw attention to his ability to be an individual, whilst also keeping this in check by expressing his concern to be like the other kids at school. Harry therefore seems to have most to gain from playing down his valuing of togetherness. Naming A further constraint of being together may be that it encourages others to utilise naming strategies that publicly validate their identities as ‘twins’. Identical twin Andrea remembered: Andrea: […] They’d say ‘Andrea and Rebecca’ I’d be, ‘just a minute, it was Rebecca or it was me!’ Why say both of them? Just cos people maybe are used to seeing us together all the time, we did everything together so it was ‘Andrea and Rebecca’ […]. According to this logic, if twins are together, then their names go together. Although their similar-looking bodies may have encouraged others to pair them up in this way, being seen together could certainly play its part. Indeed, non-identical twins also reported being named in ways that symbolically affirmed their ‘twin’ identities when they were together. For instance, Ann (a different-sex twin aged 24) recalled that

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‘when we went to secondary school we were kept in the same class and introduced as twins’.

Being apart At the time of interview, Ruth and Emma (aged 13), Adam and Olivia (aged 16), Charlotte and Hannah (aged 15) and Liam and Dan (aged 17) were apart for some or all of their school classes. Some of the twins spoke of how being in different classes allowed them to grow as individuals. Justin (aged 22) remembered that that this ‘definitely helped us to develop our own characters’. Dan (aged 17) explained that it was in picking his A-level subjects that ‘it then started appearing that we were completely different’. Within this context of apartness, twins may have more scope for negotiating their identities. Firstly, this provides an opportunity to be repeatedly seen to be apart from one’s twin and thus to resist assumptions of twin togetherness. Twins may seek to further extend their presentation of ‘detachment’ by minimising social contact with their twin outside of lesson time at school. For instance, Olivia explained that she and Adam just said ‘hello to each other’ and, similarly, Charlotte told me: Charlotte: I think [friends] just treat us like we’re not twins but we’re more like friends. It’s like when I see Hannah I don’t like stop and speak to her. I just say hi and bye. Something like that. Hannah: I’d pull a mucky face. The ‘hi and bye’ approach provides a clear contrast to stereotypes of twin togetherness: ‘everyone expects you to walk around together’ and ‘spend all your time together’ (Rachel, aged 20). Naming Being in separate classes could also have consequences for the way in which the twins were identified and ‘named’ by others. As Sally explained: Sally: I think we were in the same class for the first year [of senior school], and then second year – first time ever separate classes – so we were … twelve and we both said how weird it was and erm … but it was quite nice actually because no one got us mixed up for once at school. For Sally, a non-identical twin, space could help other children to put the right face with the right name and thus attribute her with the

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correct identity. Within this setting, children thus came to validate her ‘individual’ identity by attributing her with a personal name. Emma and Ruth’s narrative tells a different story: Kate: Do people at school know you’re twins? Emma: In my half of the year, people are just finding out that I’ve got a twin. Kate: Oh cos you’re in different year groups aren’t you? Emma: Yeah. Ruth: And most of [the] people know in my year. Emma: People like see you around and say, ‘oh have you got a twin?!’ Kate: Right, so would you introduce yourself as a twin? Ruth: No. Emma: No. Kate: How do you think they found out then? Emma: Well sometimes we stand together at break time and when they’re walking past they can see us looking the same. Most people do. While being apart provides these twins with an opportunity to distance themselves from their physical sameness and temporarily present a publicly ‘unique’ body to pupils within their class, their physical similarities also make it difficult to escape being identified as ‘twins’ altogether. Although Emma and Ruth choose not to introduce themselves as twins to other people and it may take some time for others to spot the presence of another person who looks like ‘Emma’, as soon as they stand together, their sameness is thrown into view and their identity as twins confirmed. Thus, as Craib (1998: 7) notes, ‘it is important to consider under what conditions one might be able to prescribe, erase and rewrite one’s identity […] Once I am seen my ability to revise my identity is limited’. School space may therefore only provide a partial escape for those twins whose bodies confer their twin identity on their behalf. Within this enclosed space, their physical similarities are always at risk of being uncovered. This makes it difficult for these twins to ‘pass’ as ‘non-twins’ and, should they attempt such a transformation, also potentially places them at risk of being ‘discredited’ (Goffman, 1963b) should others find out that they are not who they say they are. Friends Being in different classes or parts of the year could also help twins to make their own friends; as Ruth explained, ‘you’ve got your own

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friends in your own class’. The organisation of the ‘school day’ makes space for establishing particular social networks. As children are moved from one class to the next in age grade cohorts, they are also positioned and repositioned within different social circles. For some twins, being in ‘separate’ classes helped them to extend the time they spent apart from each other after school. Sally recalled that this was the case for herself and Rachel: ‘I never ever went out with her and her friends.’ Whilst Rachel enjoyed ‘being in with the social crowd, knowing lots of people and going to the pub’, Sally considered Rachel’s friends to be ‘bitches’ and felt ‘really uncomfortable’ in their presence. As we also saw in the previous section on bedrooms, having one’s own friends may therefore allow twins an opportunity to spend time apart away from the home setting and the shared bedroom. The social networks on offer at school can be valuable resources in establishing and experiencing individuality. Some of the adult twins recalled how having different friends at school reflected and established their different personalities and interests. For instance, Andrea explained that her sister Rebecca was always with the ‘in’ people’, while she was ‘with the swotty people’. Similarly, Sally explained that her sister Rachel ‘got in with the trendy crowd’. Speaking about his present situation, Liam (aged 17) explained that he had ‘those types of friends’ who ‘don’t really give a damn about work’. Further differences could then be developed as twins took on new interests within their distinct friendship groups. For example, Sally recalled how they ‘had similar interests and then [Rachel] changed a lot and image became a lot more important to her’, while Andrea explained that she would rather ‘work and play but not play as much as Rebecca’. In this sense, then, twins may utilise friends as resources for affirming further dimensions of difference. In line with this, many twins said they did not like it when friends treated them as if they were interchangeable: Charlotte: Yeah. Like erm … Gail, one minute she was asking me to go out with her or sommat, and like if I said no so she’d ask Hannah and she would say, ‘well you asked Charlotte first so you can go out with her. I don’t want to go out with you. You’re just asking me cos Charlotte can’t go’. Andrea: […] But some friends wouldn’t invite us round say for example for sleepovers ... Kate: Why?

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Andrea: Because they didn’t want both of us there. Kate: But they’d want one of you? Andrea: They’d want one person. Not one because they prefer Andrea or they prefer Rebecca, they’d want one round because two’s too many. Yet although some twins did not like feeling like they were indistinguishable and interchangeable, this very sense of interchangeability could, as Andrea acknowledged, also be used to help maintain friendships: Andrea: […] Rebecca used to know [our friends] more when I was settled with my boyfriend. I didn’t go [out], but she did and she sort of kept, in a way, them friends for me when I was off being the quiet one […] I suppose being a twin has been an advantage. I say that definitely cos I probably would have lost a lot of my friends. Here, Rebecca continues the friendship work of, and on behalf of, Andrea and in the process protects Andrea from losing her friends. In this sense, the social acceptance of this stereotype of interchangeabillity (amongst their friends) works in Andrea’s favour. Twins may also be able to extend their circle of friends through their fellow twin. Although many of the older children spoke of having their ‘own’ friends, these were not often fought over and clearly marked out in the same way as bedroom space. Moreover, although these twins often ‘named and claimed’ ‘best friends’ or friends who they were more close to, they also sometimes identified themselves as being friends with their twins’ friends too. For example, Emma and Ruth explained: Emma: Well they’re our friends but they’re like– Ruth: Emma’s best friends are just friends to me and my best friends are just friends to Emma. Similarly, Liam said: Liam: […] We’re in the same kind of group of friends. We’ve got like … at school, there’s like a group of us, which are all pretty good friends. But […] I’ll have some people in that group who’ll be more friends with me than they will be with Dan […].

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Holding on to twinship Twinship can therefore offer twins some advantages, advantages which may, for some twins, be hard to pass up. Even when twins have left school and are living apart from each other, they may still draw on their status as twins to attract social attention whilst also exploiting this distance to affirm individuality. This is best displayed by Sally’s narrative of going to university: Sally: […] I think I liked [being at university] … definitely. I mean I wanted [university friends] to see [Rachel]. I sometimes […] felt, not initially, but after I’d known them for a bit, the need to tell them I was a twin. And I don’t know why. Maybe it was because everyone had always known me as a twin and I was finding it almost offensive that people weren’t like ‘oh you’re a twin!’ But I felt in a way that I should tell people I was a twin soonish, cos … it was almost a novelty because not everyone’s a twin and people found it ‘oh wow you’re a twin!’ […] And when I came I felt very lonely cos I wasn’t with Rachel anymore but I really enjoyed it in a way because I was almost sole attention, I wasn’t half a person I was one person. I’d felt in a way sometimes that I’d been half – like when Rachel and me shared friends. I felt like we were sharing their attention as well and I thought, ‘well why can’t I have a friend all to myself?’ […] It was nice to be at uni, for my friends to know me and want to be my friend and not say, ‘what’s Rachel doing?’ as well. […] They’d just see me and I quite liked that, definitely. I liked being on my own. Just being me, Sally, not Sally and Rachel. I did like that definitely. I mean, I did find it weird that I felt the need to tell people I was a twin cos I did in a way and I really don’t know why I did, but I had to. Here space becomes so effective at destroying twin social identity that it has to be stated in order to have any chance of being publicly acknowledged. Unlike the school setting, where twins are segregated within the parameters of the school gates, here twins are completely spatially apart, being located at different universities. This complete separation means that Sally is able to present herself as a singular, separate person who is on her own. At university, others do not see Sally and her twin sister together or classify them as ‘twins’. Within this spatial context, she is individually known as ‘Sally’, not ‘Sally and Rachel’ and is also able to know others on this one-to-one basis. As Chapter 4 pointed out, such physical separation may be even more

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vital in helping twins who look very similar escape being publicly identified as twins. For Sally, it is the power of this ‘separation’ to eradicate twinship that she also finds particularly hard to bear. Being apart from her twin, she is unable to attract any attention as a twin and she misses the social capital that this once brought. Consequently, she tries to re-identify herself as a ‘twin’ by telling others that she is a twin. Without her sister being present to verify this, she carries a photo with her: Sally: I probably ended up telling him [her boyfriend] the first night that I met him about her because I was talking to him for a long time. I always end up getting her picture out and I don’t know why. I suppose I’m just proud that kind of, I am a twin in a way, cos it’s a different thing, so it’s something interesting. It feels different to me than a normal sibling in that way. It really does. To me it’s a different relationship I have with her. Like partners who want to display their attachments to each other, Sally is able to use this visual image to ‘virtually’ transport her sister across space so that they are publicly viewed alongside each other, together again. Aided by this picture, she may be able to ‘prove’ that she is a twin and narrate their closeness, thus gaining symbolic and social capital for being a twin. In prompting others to ask questions about her life as a twin, this picture also potentially helps Sally to draw others into her performance of twinship and participate in the activity of building a ‘repertoire of twinship’ (the importance of talk and public repertoires of twinship will be discussed in the following chapter). Even where adult twins may not be identified as twins in their day-to-day lives, they may still bump into childhood friends who once again position them as twins. As Brian (aged 24) told me in his questionnaire response, ‘seeing old friends now is strange because for me – they always ask about Anne’. Thus, just as the children at school reminded Liam of his relationship to Dan, so these friends remind Brian of his relationship to Anne.

Space as a resource for constructing identity Children’s identities are constructed in and through space. In the first part of this chapter, we found that the older twins seemed to have more opportunity (than the youngest twins) to express their individuality by controlling the form and content of their bedroom space. Some of

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the older twins were also aided by the resource of having their ‘own’ rooms, bounded spaces within which they could display their uniqueness and contain the self. Within the context of the shared room, these boundaries had to be worked out between twins. These twins provide each other with valuable human resources in constructing meaningful places and a sense of individuality. Yet, paradoxically, in relying on each other to be ‘individuals’, they also draw attention to their relatedness, another defining aspect of ‘twin’ identity. While younger twins were more likely to draw attention to the value of togetherness at home, older twins did not abandon this completely. Twins move in and out of twinship within different situations, for example, to seek comfort and companionship or privacy and control. A slightly different picture emerges in the school context, where children are situated amongst many other children. Here, togetherness is played down by one of the youngest twins in a bid to gain some independence from his fellow twin. This draws our attention to the importance of social context and the ‘situated’ nature of identities. Where twins are ‘split up’ into different classes, the structuring force of the school also provides them with access to different (segregated) groups of social contacts that can be exploited to help emphasise difference and independence. In this sense, these children are empowered by the very forces that also constrain them. Space may provide twins with the opportunity to be seen to be apart from each other and thus to negotiate being known and named as ‘twins’ by others. This may be especially important where twins look very similar. However, within the enclosed setting of the school, some twins’ bodies may still give them away. More ‘space’ may be needed to conceal their twinship. Sally’s account provides an example of how this could be achieved. However, importantly, it draws attention back to the ways in which twins move in and out of twinship and find it difficult to relinquish this identity completely.

Notes 1. This is adapted from Mitchell and Reid-Walsh’s (2002) original suggestion that bedrooms can be theorised as ‘cultural texts’ or expressions of popular child culture. 2. An animated television series from Japan. 3. The main character in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories about wizards and witches.

6 Talk

Talk is another resource that twins use to construct and present their identities. Through both the form and content of their talk, twins can variously play up and play down their identities as ‘twins’. Talk can, however, also limit the success of twins’ performances. Their occasional slips of the tongue and seemingly unconscious modes of speaking can sometimes contradict the messages they want to convey. This chapter, then, explores the opportunities and constraints that talk presents to twins. Although this involves returning to explore the twins’ descriptions of themselves and each other, the main concern is to examine what these narratives tell us about how twins talk (the techniques and strategies they use and the styles of talk that characterise their narratives). The first part of this chapter examines how certain modes of talk may be utilised to construct and affirm messages of identity and the second part shows how these messages may be temporarily interrupted, undermined or suspended. Although, for the most part, it will focus on the talk utilised by twins during interviews, some (comparative) attention is also paid to their representations of self as they appeared on the qualitative questionnaires and open-ended self-return task.

Twins, children and talk Research on twins and talk clusters around three main themes: parent-child interaction styles, twin-to-twin interaction and language development in twins. Parents of twins have two children to care for simultaneously which, as Stewart (2003: 105) points out, means they ‘are involved in much greater physical demands’. Amongst other things, research relating to parent-child interaction styles has found that when compared with singleton children, twins have less speech 161

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singularly directed to each of them and fewer and shorter individual conversations with their mothers (see Rutter and Redshaw, 1991). Researchers have also analysed the extent to which twins can be said to develop their own autonomous (or ‘secret’) language. Common knowledge and mutual experience may make it less necessary for twins to communicate in a generally understandable manner (Rutter and Redshaw, 1991: 888). For instance, Mittler (1970) found that autonomous language was more common amongst identical twins than nonidentical twins. Finally, there is a long tradition of research about twins’ language development dating as far back as Day’s early study in 1932. Day (1932a, 1932b) found that twins lagged behind singletons, a finding which has continued to be endorsed, to varying extents, by other researchers, from Koch’s (1966) early research in Chicago and Hay’s La Trobe Twin Study (Hay et al., 1987) to Thorpe’s (2006) more recent research in Australia. Although language is, as these studies show, part of our human development, we must also acknowledge that children do not simply passively absorb talk, that is, they do not only learn to speak. On the contrary, research examining children’s talk has pointed towards the ways in which children use language to generate and reproduce children’s culture (Opie and Opie, 1977: 105), carve out a place for the self (Cheshire, 2000; Danby, 1996; James, 1995) and organise and control their own social worlds (Danby, 2002; Goodwin, 1990). The New Social Studies of Childhood, with its focus on exploring the ‘being’ of childhood as it is lived in the here and now, has thus provided an alternative lens through which to view the act of talk. For instance, in her Australian research, Danby (2002) moves away from a traditional understanding of children’s language development, which is often focused on the notion of ‘lack’ (children as not yet fully competent in understanding and using language), towards one that acknowledges children as competent social actors in their present status as children. Talk, for her, is one situated practice which children actively use to construct their own social worlds and through which they display their interactional competence. For me, talk is an embodied social action and one important medium through which twins construct their identities. Studying their talk can thus ‘offer ways into examining how [they] are bringing off and managing a sense of themselves’ (Bamberg, 2004: 368). This chapter participates in this exploration by examining the modes of talk which characterised the twins’ accounts. This emphasis on exploring how people talk has a sociological and anthropological

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history. The ethnography of communication (which emerged from the broader field of the ethnography of speaking) has explored the norms of communicative conduct in different communities, the links between a community’s experience of life and how this is expressed through their language (Coates, 1996; Riley, 2007). Sociolinguists have traditionally explored how social factors such as social class, ethnicity and gender are correlated with particular linguistic features and linguistic variations (Chambers, 1995; Stockwell, 2002). Conversation analysis (CA), with its links to ethnomethodology (see Francis and Hester, 2004), has explored the mechanics or structure of talk and the strategies (such as turntaking and collaboration) that people employ during their everyday interactions with each other (Manning, 2000: 222). In line with CA and the ethnography of communication, this chapter draws attention to the importance of exploring the techniques or modes of talk used and how these themselves constitute part of the story being told. Indeed, as Hymes (who coined the term ‘ethnography of communication’) noted, how we talk is part of what is said (Hymes, 1971: 59). However, it is important to note that this is not a study which utilises the methodology of CA, not least because it does not utilise the associated system of transcription, data analysis or its focus on ‘naturally occurring’ talk (Have, 2009; Hutchby and Woofit, 1998: 7).

Similarities and differences Notions of similarity and difference underpinned the twins’ narratives and thus constituted key components of their talk. In describing their similarities and differences, twins worked to construct their identities in the moments they were speaking. We have already caught glimpses of this when twins talked about their bodies (Chapter 4). However, given that notions of similarity and difference were key components of twins’ talk, and given that, as we will see later on, these offer an insight into some of the techniques twins used to accentuate and affirm the messages conveyed in the content of their talk, they deserve more attention as part of this chapter. Ash and Harry (aged eight) were far less concerned than the older children to talk up difference. For example, Ash told me, ‘we’re both the same, noisy and quiet’, and Harry explained some of their shared interests: ‘we both like playing on the Playstation. We both like playing on the PC. We both like watching TV.’ However, although not preoccupied with asserting difference, Harry often wanted to present himself as better than Ash (‘Ash can do his twenty-five [metres of

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the swimming pool]. I’ve done my twenty-five, my fifty’) and Ash sometimes positioned Harry as being more ‘babyish’ (‘Don’t act like a baby! He always talks like a baby’). As James (1993: 162) found, the ‘idea of hierarchy and competition is firmly embedded within children’s own culture and nowhere more apparent than in the children’s attitudes towards educational attainment and ability’. In some ways, Harry’s assertions of superior ability (about swimming and also reading) express his commitment towards growing up: Harry is a better reader and swimmer than Ash, both of which are (within the context of schooling) often thought to improve with age. In this sense, then, we could say that Harry uses Ash to effectively talk up his status as a young child who is successfully becoming an older child. This is more obvious in Ash’s aspersion that Harry is a ‘baby’. Not only is he effectively telling his brother to ‘grow up’, he also tries to position himself as the more ‘grown up’ twin by transferring babyish acts onto his brother. As we found in Chapters 4 and 5, the older child twins more commonly wanted to be seen to be different. For all of the twins, but especially the non-identical twins, this extended beyond talking about bodily/dress differences (which featured in Chapter 4) to incorporate describing differences in personality and interests. For instance, as we will see later on, Emma and Ruth continued their ‘feminine’/‘tomboy’ distinction by discussing their colour preferences and interest (or lack of) in ‘teddy bears’, while Charlotte and Hannah pinpointed their different levels of laziness and their different liking for sports. Liam was most active in constructing himself and his brother Dan as different. He often presented Dan as the ‘granddad’ ‘goody-two-shoes’ academic who would rather stay in than go out, who was responsible, quiet and weighed people up. In contrast, Liam presented himself as the loud extrovert, who would rather go out, who cares less about studying and more about socialising. Talking about their different approaches to making friends, Liam explained that he was: Liam: Straight in, minus weaknesses, strengths … and then mull over it for about a second. I’m more kind of extrovert. I’m not held back if I see something that er … I think Dan’s a bit more responsible in that he er … [inaudible] Dan: I would– Liam: In that he thinks about things before … he’ll like think about things. Dan: Look before I leap whereas you probably leap and then look.

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In his separate interview, Liam also explained: Liam: Dan’s quite self–, no I’m self motivated as well, but Dan is always doing his project and his work […] That’s like now. Dan’s doing his [project] now, like staying in instead of going out with his friends and that. He’ll be like ‘no can’t come doing my tec project’ as I’ll go ‘yeah I’ll come’. So he’s got the granddad kind of approach. As we also saw in Chapter 4, Liam also identified himself as a nonconformist drummer with long hair. Sometimes these differences were listed in order to resist being classified within the category ‘twin’. Taking about the rules and regulations of his household, he told me: Liam: Like I can’t have my girlfriend round during that two weeks unless I go to hers so it’s just like that. It’s, I mean, my dad always says, ‘don’t do anything I wouldn’t do’ so we always, it limits us to not much [laughs] but we just … As long as it doesn’t […] hurt us, and it doesn’t hurt the house it’s all right. We haven’t got any kind of twin, kind of, I don’t know, kind of rules. No its kind of er … well, Dan’s the more responsible one, he’s a lot more responsible in respecting what my dad and my mum say as I’ll try and do things behind their back or something like that er … yeah. Even though the topic of conversation is based upon household rules, Liam still manages to use this to create further examples of difference. It is his own assertion that they do not have any ‘twin’ rules that leads him to resist stereotypes of sameness by proclaiming his difference and characterising himself as the less responsible ‘one’.

The importance of contrast Liam’s account draws attention to a mode of talk often utilised by the older children during their accounts of difference: contrast. In the examples above, we see how Liam’s use of contrast is part of his presentation of difference. In other words, this mode of talk helps Liam to affirm and accentuate his assertions of individuality. Although Liam could have just stated that he was different from his brother and then explained his own personality, he brings his brother into his narrative (‘he’s got the granddad kind of approach’; ‘he’s a lot more responsible’) to draw out and evidence the precise dimensions of their differences.

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Even though, in most of these extracts, Dan is not physically present at the interview, Liam still uses Dan to convey messages about himself. By emphasising Dan’s ‘goody-two-shoes’ character, he can also emphasise his own ‘laid back’, less responsible nature. We can therefore see that ‘the characters we construct in our story telling and their relationships with each other … all combine to express who we are’ (Coates, 2003: 7). In the context of the joint interviews, twins could sit together describing their differences. However, this still did not prevent some twins from characterising their twin siblings in their own accounts. For example: Emma: We’re just not identical. Kate: Tell me what’s different. Emma: We’ve got different personalities. Ruth: And I like things like teddy bears and pink and Emma likes blue, the colour blue, and stuff like that. Emma: It’s like, [impersonating Ruth] ‘oh my teddy bears’ and I’m like, ‘no!’ Helped by her sister, Emma takes the narrative floor, adding another dimension to their ‘feminine’/‘tomboy’ distinction (outlined previously in Chapter 4). Using the first person singular pronoun ‘I’, Ruth voices her opinion as a discretely embodied person (Harré, 1998: 55) and contrasts herself with ‘Emma’: Ruth has teddy bears and pink and Emma blue. At the end of this extract, Emma impersonates her sister Ruth, characterising her as a ‘figure’ in her story (Goffman, 1974) and acting out the differences Ruth describes. Like Liam, Emma and Ruth actively resist aligning themselves with stereotypes of twin sameness. However, paradoxically, in talking up their lack of fit with the stereotype ‘twin’, these twins also participate in reproducing this cultural category. As Said (1979) noted when examining how European identity was constructed in relation to the Orient, both are kept intact through their mutual opposition. This use of opposition was also reflected in some twins’ written accounts of twinship. When I asked Hannah to write a list of the similarities and differences she had with her twin sister (Charlotte), she composed a whole set of oppositions: Were different coz I’m into sports ⫹ she’s not. We have different fashion sense. All Charlotte is bothered about is her hair, make-up ⫹ nails, she has to look perfect wer as if I look o.k I won’t be too bothered how I look unless I go to see my b.friend! Charlotte is very messy

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were I like my room tidy. I like working with animals but Charlotte dosn’t. I am lazy and Charlotte isn’t. Although the research tool (a list) may serve to encourage this kind of response, her sister Charlotte, who seemed more ambivalent about relinquishing all aspects of twinship, provided a less intense version of difference: Hannah is lazy hardly never smiles or laughs. She brainyer, she does[n’t] join anything like a club or sports. She’s always on the phone and just starts on u 4 no reason. Thus, whilst Charlotte describes Hannah, she only positions herself within her account once: ‘she brainyer’. In contrast, Hannah constantly contrasts herself with Charlotte so that what Charlotte is, Hannah is not and vice versa. On those occasions where there was some implication of potential overlap between the self and Other, some twins worked to maintain these symbolic distinctions and achieve a sense of difference: Ian: […] I think I’m a bit messier than Peter. Peter’s bedroom is always tidier than mine. Peter: It’s not always. Ian: It is. It’s tidy-er. Peter protests against being identified as the person who always has a tidier room, which leads Ian to reaffirm that Peter’s room is tidy-er. A similar incident occurred in Hannah and Charlotte’s joint interview: Kate: Whose is [the hamster]? Hannah: Just mine. Charlotte: Hannah’s. Hannah: Charlotte dunt like pets. Charlotte: I like Monty [the dog]. Kate: Who’s is Monty? Is it a family pet? Hannah: Yeah, family. I do animal care though at college. Like Peter, Charlotte disagrees with her twin’s classification of her (as someone that ‘dunt like pets’). However, because of the potential overlap that this creates, in response, Hannah further emphasises her increased liking for animals – ‘I do animal care though at college’.

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Comparing and contrasting A less common method of talking up difference was repeatedly utilised by Adam and Olivia, the only different-sex older child twins. Rather than directly focusing on the ways in which they were different from each other, these twins more often seemed primarily concerned to talk up the similarities they shared with one or other of their older siblings: Olivia: We should have been twins me and Craig cos we’re more alike than anyone. Although me and Naomi look the same, kind of look the same, me and Craig have got the characteristics. Kate: What do you think you have in common with Craig? Olivia: Short temper. Kate: Yeah. Olivia: Well not short temper but just get cross. Kate: Yeah. Olivia: And Naomi and Adam, me and Craig are really fussy about cleanliness. Kate: Right. Olivia: Adam and Naomi aren’t, well they are fussed of course, but they’re not as fussed as me and Craig. So yeah, stuff like that. This emphasis on similarity as a means of identification resonates with Anthony Cohen’s work on The Symbolic Construction of Community (1985). For him it is a sense of similarity that helps individuals to map out the lines of belonging and position themselves amongst others. Rather than directly contrasting herself with Adam, Olivia focuses on the commonalities she shares with Craig and only after comparing herself to him does she use these commonalities as points of differentiation between herself and ‘Adam and Naomi’. Indeed, for Olivia, it is her and Craig that fit more within notions of ‘twin sameness’. She thus effectively tries to re-twin herself with her older brother, explaining that they ‘should have been twins’ instead. Adam was more reluctant to identify himself with his sister Naomi: Adam: I think, me and Naomi are more alike, we’re sort of a bit the same in a way but different from Olivia and Craig. Olivia and Craig, they usually have quite a short, you know, temper. For Adam, he and Naomi are (only) ‘sort of a bit the same in a way’. Indeed, according to Adam, ‘there’s not so much similarity between

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me and Naomi as there is between Craig and Olivia’. It is only ‘because Olivia is sort of the same [as Craig that] me and Naomi are sort of put together’. The latter suggests that Adam is in a more ambivalent position than Olivia and is classified within a paired group by default (to maintain the distinction). As such, differences often emerged as latent qualities of the similarities they shared with their other siblings. Adam and Olivia’s accounts therefore draw our attention to another, less direct, mode of differentiation, where similarities are stressed and differences are constructed through these. Being different-sex twins and falling outside of the cultural stereotype of twinship, this may have been something these twins could have afforded. Indeed, it is interesting that even though Charlotte and Hannah, and Ruth and Emma did have one other sibling still living at home, they chose to focus their attention on differentiating between each other rather than aligning themselves to their fellow sibling. A range of reasons can be postulated for this. Charlotte and Hannah may wish to avoid making alliances with Ellie because she is a younger sibling. Charlotte and Hannah were 15 and Ellie was 12. Although Emma and Ruth’s sibling was older (John was aged 16, whereas Emma and Ruth were 13), he was of a different sex and only three years older. Naomi and Craig, on the other hand, were much older than Adam and Olivia and held status as adults. Thus, whilst Adam and Olivia were 16, Craig was 25 and Naomi 24 years old. It may also be that, for these same-sex twins, one’s greatest threat to claims of individuality is one’s fellow twin and therefore it is this person who needs to be utilised as the Other. These sibling alliances were not, however, in any sense permanent or fixed. Just as Hall (1997: 53) found when studying the identity positions of Martiniquains and Jamaicans, ‘the boundaries of difference are continually changing repositioned in relation to different points of reference’. Thus, since Adam and Olivia’s sibling group contained two boys and two girls, there was also opportunity to re-group along gendered lines, as Craig and Naomi explained: Craig: […] It’s quite nice though that [Adam’s] quite like me in that we like the same things. We very much like the same things and we both like doing the same kind of sport. I mean it’s nice now that he’s at an age where we can go off and we do exercise together. So most nights we go off and we do some sort of exercise whether it’s swimming, and we’ll swim up and down the pool next to each other, or running. We sort of can go and do a lot of it together now which is really nice.

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Naomi: […] [Craig and Adam] like the same things. Like you know, sport and they like to keep fit and like me and Olivia like to do shopping so you know, it’s easy. Similarly, Adam and Olivia’s parents explained: David: But you see [Adam’s] not interested in chocolate, which nor is Craig, and Naomi and Olivia wonder around shops and … Janet: Yes they like to. Like they’ll go into little bars and the boys aren’t interested in that. Olivia and Adam, Olivia and Naomi love going around London together. David: It doesn’t interest Adam. Janet: No. Naomi and Olivia are thus identified as chocolate-loving shoppers and Adam and Craig as interested in sport. These distinctions both embody and reflect broader cultural scripts of masculinity and femininity and help to provide another rationale for splitting the four siblings into two pairs. Craig in particular tries to align himself with Adam, arguing that they ‘like the same things’, ‘swim up and down the pool next to each other’ and ‘do a lot of [sport] together’. Although Adam and Olivia seemed to pay less attention to these particular pairings (Olivia only explaining that she and Naomi went ‘shopping and stuff’), these narratives may potentially still serve to identify Adam with Craig and Olivia with Naomi when talking about hobbies and interests. Indeed, even if they do not necessarily feature heavily in Adam and Olivia’s own accounts, the consensus shared between Craig, Naomi, Janet and David could prove difficult for Adam and Olivia to overturn. This draws our attention back to the importance of family narratives and, more particularly, to how identities are constructed across the internal-external dialectic of identification. There was often overlap between the twins’ own constructions of difference and their other family member’s narratives. For instance, during an initial phone call, Emma and Ruth’s mother Sue explained that ‘one is feminine’ and the ‘other is a tom boy’. During the introductory meeting Ruth also told me that her Grandma always said they were different because Emma wore trousers and Ruth skirts. These are the exact distinctions that Emma and Ruth actually utilise to narrate their own differences. Similarly, although concerned not to present Liam as less academic, Liam’s mum and dad Allison and Mike constructed a very similar list of differences to Liam and Dan (see Chapter 3).

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The twins’ internal presentations of self and Other cannot be isolated from these external perceptions of who they are and are not. Rather, these extracts (and, indeed, some of those previously outlined in Chapter 4) suggest that family reputations feed into and help structure the twins’ accounts and provide ‘the means by which the moral identities of each individual gets built up, consolidated and modified over time and gets carried from one situation to the other’ (Finch and Mason, 1993: 149).

Normalisation strategies Within their narratives of difference, some of these older twins used a variety of ‘normalising strategies’ to play down the significance of being a twin and to situate the self within culturally specific notions of personhood. The main function of these normalising strategies: is to defuse and contain the potential disruption [produced by the presence of twins in society] by transcribing twinship into symbolic terms which are consistent with the general classification system of the society in question (Stewart, 2000: 13). In many respects, the twin-to-twin (self/Other) differentiation technique previously outlined can be conceptualised as a normalising strategy, because it attempts to break down the connectedness of the twin group. However, other more specific strategies were also employed. As we have already seen, in some cases twins literally spoke about being ‘normal’ (for example, Peter explained that being a twin was ‘just the same as normal people’) and some of these twins also identified themselves as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’. Hannah and Charlotte sometimes emphasised the ‘diluted’ nature of their relationship by declaring that they were ‘just’ sisters. Liam also explained, ‘It’s just brother with a title on top of it’. Related to this, some of the twins spoke of being older or younger, thereby diffusing notions of simultaneity so heavily identified with twinship. Hannah (aged 15) explained that she should have her own room because she was the eldest. Olivia told me that Adam was ‘nine minutes older’ than her, and, when explaining the way he had ordered the different people in his drawing of his family, Adam (aged 16) said, ‘Olivia is younger than me and Naomi is younger than Craig’. By introducing these age hierarchies, these twins appeal to a notion of ‘normal’ siblingship. Indeed, in all of these examples, the notion of siblingship helps to deal with the anomaly of twoness by effectively getting rid of it (Turner, 1969): the two are symbolically prised apart to produce the self as a singular entity.

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Balancing individuality and twinship Like many of the older children, the same-sex adult twins talked up differences in personality. Justin explained: Justin: We’re different. He likes to impress, he’s more, I think he’s a little selfish [laughs] but that’s helped him to get what he wants, being a bit selfish and yeah, he can always … I think he’s more selfish than me, sort of more inconsiderate, I mean more self-considerate not the same, and I think that’s helped him. Although Justin seems to re-word aspects of his description to recast his brother in a slightly better light (self-considerate rather than inconsiderate), he maintains the difference between them. Like Justin, Sally also assured me that she and her twin sister Rachel ‘really [we]re different’. However, like Adam and Olivia, Sally, an adult twin, sometimes narrated difference in terms of how she was similar to one of her other older sisters, Carrie: Sally: Mo and Rachel are very similar. They have very similar personalities. Carrie and me are much more alike in that manner. I mean we’re not identical but Mo and Rachel are very similar. Although Sally clarifies the extent of this similarity (‘we’re not identical’), she effectively re-twins herself with a different sister in order to show up the differences between herself and her twin sister. As was the case for Adam and Olivia, it may be less necessary for Sally to evidence her individuality by directly contrasting herself with her twin sister. As Chapter 5 pointed out, Sally lives away from her sister and now feels she has external verification of her status as an individual: she is publicly acknowledged as ‘Sally’ rather than ‘Sally and Rachel’. Also like the older child twins, some of the adult twins developed a range of normalisation strategies. Justin referred to his fellow twin as ‘my brother’, while Brian (aged 24) told me, ‘I’m just Anne’s brother and she’s my sister’. His sister Anne erected a hierarchy of age: ‘I don’t ever mention I’m a twin unless Brian’s with me and then I say I’m the eldest (Ha)’, and similarly Jen (aged 36) explained: ‘he is five minutes older than me – this has always been a very important age gap – both jokingly and in family hierarchy!’ In line with this, some of the adult twins also spoke of how they would resist identifying themselves as ‘twins’ when strangers encouraged them

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to take up and perform their identities as twins. Two questions – ‘are you identical?’ and ‘are you close?’ – were regularly cited amongst those commonly asked by strangers and reflect the public yearning for confirmation of the cultural (identical) twin ideal. Jen (36) wrote: It remains quite amazing to me how the sequence of conversation invariably goes with new people when family members are discussed … ‘& I’m a twin’ ‘Oh really? Is your twin a boy or a girl?’ ‘I have a twin brother’ ‘Are you identical?’ Sally also explained: ‘they always ask “are you identical?” and then they ask “are you close?” They are the main two questions I’ve ever got asked.’ Importantly, the question about closeness typically follows the question about zygosity status. This order potentially helps strangers to identify where the twins fall on the ‘continuum of siblingship’ (outlined in Chapter 2) and thus what extent of closeness to expect to find between them. During these public repertoires of twinship, strangers may seek particular responses to these questions. As Sally also pointed out, ‘they’re not so interested if you’re not [identical]’. Judged to embody a ‘mythic’ closeness that we all desire, older child and adult identical twins may still potentially be able to obtain status for their twoness, whilst nonidentical twins, falling further down the continuum of siblingship, may receive less attention. Whilst members of the public ask the questions that are framed in terms of dominant discourses of twinship, twins form their replies in response to these questions, taking up or declining the invitation to perform their identities as twins through talk. Thus, Jen explained that ‘his nose is larger than mine’ in a bid to fight off any presumption that they were identical. Similarly, Sally explained that she might say that she and Rachel were ‘complete opposites’. Yet despite the fact that adult twins explained how they were different from their fellow twin and sometimes played down the significance that twinship had for them, compared to many of the older child twins’ narratives, the adult twins often seemed more relaxed about also emphasising some aspects of sameness. Jen (aged 36) wrote, ‘I think we are still very similar in terms of our values and our personalities’, while Justin (aged 22) explained, ‘he’s matured a bit, but we’re mature when we have to be and equally we can be extremely immature’ and Andrea (aged 23) said, ‘personality wise she’s caring, but we’re exactly the same in that way’. Similarly, in their ‘Twins talk’ study, Davis and Davis

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(2004c) found that the adult identical twins they spoke with were very comfortable talking about their similarities.

Exoticising twinship Alongside this, some of the female same-sex adult twins also gave elaborate accounts of their psychic connectedness: Sally: I told you about the one weird instant, about the kind of sympathy pains that we had when we were, we must have been about 11/12 […] She fell off her horse and I was at home and I had really bad stomach ache and a really bad head ache. I mean it might just have been a coincidence. But then she came back with a suspected broken leg and concussion. Andrea: Sometimes we’ve done strange things […] like when Rebecca had her thyroid out, I don’t know subconsciously obviously I knew she was having it out. She was sat there. I had a polo neck on that day and I walked in stood there like that scraping my neck, but I didn’t know. By variously referring to these experiences as ‘weird’ and ‘strange’, Sally and Andrea draw attention to the exotic, unusual and mysterious aspects of twinship. Indeed, these accounts reproduce dominant discourses of twin closeness. By exoticising their bodily experiences, these twins produce idealised performances (Goffman, 1969) of twinship; everything is as we expect it should be. These twins are ‘tuned in’ to each other and intricately bound up with each other. The intimacy of twinship that we find so difficult to give up on is here embodied and displayed. In citing these experiences, Andrea and Sally provide evidence of their ‘twin’ status. Some of the adult female twins also gave intricate descriptions of their closeness and, in doing so, actively constructed it. Andrea conceptualised her relationship with Rebecca as ‘extra special’ and something underpinned by a strong sense of protectionism: Kate: Are there any other advantages [to being a twin] that you can think of? Or disadvantages? Andrea: Advantages is I suppose just being that extra special … just … I love her more than anything and if anyone ever did anything I’d kill em because she is Rebecca. And that’s why I get nervous for her, I get frightened for her, I get happy for her, and that’s why I get angry at her as well.

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Her sister Rebecca utilised notions of ‘best friendship’ and unconditional and enduring support: Rebecca: I’ve always thought, cos everyone’s like, ‘oh I’d really like to be a twin’ but I’m a twin so I don’t know anything else. And I don’t understand what it’s like not to have a twin because I can’t imagine what it’s like. What if I was on my own and I had to look after myself? I always thought of it that way that I wouldn’t … if she wasn’t to sort of look after me and I’d be like on my own. And then I thought about, oh God no, imagine having that best friend that I’ve always had, all that comfort that I’ve always had, always had that person that I know regardless of whatever I do in my life will always be there for me. No matter, even if I do the worst thing in the world, she’d always stand by me. Although Caroline’s twin had died soon after birth, she told me that she thought they were identical and explained that having a twin sister would be like having a ‘second skin that you can climb into’. As twins, they would share ‘closeness’ and ‘trust’ and ‘have each other’. This emphasis on twins providing unconditional support was also voiced by Sally: Sally: I think she’d always be there if I needed her, I know that, and she knows probably more about me than a lot of people do, she does know a lot about me and I think I underestimate how much I think she knows sometimes. Because she’s further away, because we drifted a bit I think sometimes that she doesn’t know me but she does. And she’ll know if I’m down, fed up or anything she’ll always just say, ‘don’t worry about it’, ‘don’t worry about that’, ‘you’ll be fine’ and things like that. So, I know she’s always there. In this sense, then, talk can be seen as a resource for playing up closeness and publicy affirming and performing one’s status as a ‘twin’. These narratives utilise and reproduce many of the dominant ideologies of twin closeness discussed in Chapter 2: twins are always there for each other; twins are best friends; twins are the most important people to each other and know each other ‘inside out’. Importantly, twins do not have to be physically together to perform this aspect of ‘twin’ identity. In this sense, twins may be able to display their status as ‘twins’ at the same time as signifying their status as independent individuals who do not have to do everything together.

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In contrast to the female adult twins, the female child twins produced less detailed and emotionally intense accounts of their closeness. For instance, in her account of ‘What life would be like if I wasn’t a twin’, identical-looking twin Emma explained: I wouldn’t have a close relationship with anyone as much as I do with my twin [Ruth]. Life would be like having a brother who you can talk to – like that’s going to happen. I think if [Ruth] wasn’t my twin then I would talk to my mum more because I haven’t got a twin to talk to. […] If I wasn’t a twin then I would say (like everyone else does) ‘oh I wish I was a twin, I bet it would be great fun having a twin’ but because I am a twin then I say instead ‘I wish I was a normal sister instead of a twin’. Here, Emma draws attention to the importance of being able to talk to her twin sister. According to her, she wouldn’t have ‘as much’ closeness with other people as she does with Ruth. Yet, although she identifies this closeness as something that makes being a twin different, she still wishes for a ‘normal’ sister, that is, a sister who is not also her twin. Charlotte and Hannah both said that they did not trust each other to keep their secrets. Rather than identifying closeness with their present experiences, they thought that this would develop as they got older and spent less time together: Charlotte: When we’re older we’ll probably [have] grown real closer. […] when we’re older I think like we won’t spend more time together so I think we’ll be more like, more support [to] each other. Similarly, when I asked Hannah if she thought anything would change in her relationships with her family as she got older, she said: Hannah: I don’t know, I think we’ll get closer cos we’re not around each other all the time, if I get older and move out we’ll get closer. Charlotte and Hannah’s attitudes seem to reflect their frustrations about sharing per se, a situation they see as changing in the future when they will literally have more space to develop a close relationship. Expressions of closeness (embodied in twins’ accounts of exotic happenings and of their relationships with each other) may hold particular currency for adult twins who, as we have seen, are not expected to express their twinship through always looking the same or being

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physically together. These embodied practices, if engaged in to the same extent as in childhood, would now be likely to convey stigma. Indeed, it is because these adult twins have (at least to some extent) sacrificed such embodied expressions of twinship that these tales of ‘closeness’ may be important in legitimising their identities as twins and, if they are interested in feeling special, feelings of ‘specialness’. However, it seems that not all adult twins have this resource for obtaining social capital at their disposal. Although male adult twins sometimes said they were close, their accounts contained no such affirmations of unconditional love, dedication and support: Justin: When we are together, we are very close. It’s more interesting because when we are together we learn from each other. At the beginning of the holidays I was quite keen to hear about his goings on and vice versa but at the end we did get a bit tired of each other I think, funnily enough [sarcastic tone]. So it’s good that we’ve gone our own ways. Yeah we do get easily tired of each other. For Justin, closeness is still linked to being together and is thus seen as a temporary state through which twins periodically pass. The differentsex adult twins also rarely spoke of being emotionally close. This was completely absent from Brian’s account (aged 24) and, although his sister Anne wrote about their relationship in her questionnaire response, this lacked the emotive power of the other same-sex female accounts: Brian is always at my house now because of [baby] Jack but he is very good with the baby and I think we get on a lot better since I left home. I can’t wait for Brian to get married – maybe we’ll have a joint wedding – that would be great. Jen (aged 36) played down the extent of their closeness in her questionnaire response: I wouldn’t say that we were especially close, although we have always got on well and didn’t have the arguments with each other that we did with our other siblings (me-v-Katie; Tom-v-Mark). Discourses of femininity allow women to develop ‘emotional’ relationships without undermining their status as ‘women’. For instance, men’s friendships have been contrasted with women’s. Men have been

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said to place more stress on activities than on relational aspects of friendship, to be more likely to form friendships in groups (rather than on a one-to-one basis) and engage more in sociality than intimacy (Johnson and Aries, 1998). Men may face being stigmatised for expressions of emotional closeness. In their study of adult friendships, Bank and Hunsford (cited in Reeder, 2003: 145) found that homophobia was negatively linked with intimacy between men. Closeness in differentsex twins may also be problematic, because these twins in particular have to show that they are ready to be re-partnered with another different-sex person. Given all this, it seems that in many respects it may be easier for girls to retain some aspects of twinship as they move into adulthood. Although boys may foster a sense of closeness through doing things together, this physical togetherness (if too intense in both quantity and quality) could potentially stigmatise them when they are older. Of course, should it be applicable, the same can be said for girls if they spend too much time together. However, girls have another resource at their disposal: talking about emotional closeness. Because we are unable to give up on the ideal of twin closeness (since, as Chapter 2 noted, it represents our human capacity to develop close relationships), this may be one way of still feeling like a twin, presenting one’s self as a twin to others (though accounts of closeness and exoticism) and gaining symbolic and social capital as an adult. However, given that such expressions of emotional closeness are heavily gendered, women seem to have most to gain from practising such expressions of closeness. Men, on the other hand, may face the stigma of being labelled ‘gay’ and different-sex twins ‘too close’ or ‘incestuous’.

Shifting selves Different modes of talk, then, cannot easily be mapped onto the life course. Although, generally speaking, older child twins were more intent on talking up difference than the youngest twins, this glosses over some important differences. Firstly, although most of the older child twins utilised the tool of contrast to symbolically detach the self from the Other, the presence of other siblings could potentially offer alternative techniques of differentiation which need not necessarily be so destructive. Whether or not twins actually utilised these other siblings to emphasise similarities with them over and above differences with their fellow twin may, amongst other things, depend on the extent to which they wish to play up difference and the age of their siblings. Being

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different-sex twins, Adam and Olivia could perhaps afford to utilise a less direct mode of differentiation (that explicitly expresses similarity as well as difference) than the other older same-sex child twins. Further layers of complexity emerge in relation to the gender differences that were apparent in twins’ tales of closeness and connectedness. Tales of closeness were most prominent amongst the same-sex adult female twins.

Undermining and suspending performances of identity Having now explored how twins’ talk can help them to make statements about their identities, this section of the chapter turns to look at those aspects of their talk which could undermine, challenge or suspend the messages being conveyed. Most of this section focuses on the accounts provided by the older child twins because it is here where we see the barriers that talk can present to twins successfully pulling off a consistent and wholly convincing performance of identity. The ‘we-self’1 Twins of all ages utilised the plural pronoun ‘we’ to voice their accounts of twinship. Hence, as Kozlak’s (1978) and Davis and Davis’ (2004b) research found, the plural pronoun ‘we’ continues to find its way into adult twins’ accounts of life as a twin. Unlike the language and talk considered so far, this pronoun was used in a seemingly unconscious manner. Unlike the first person pronoun ‘I’, this linguistic device positions the speaker as spokesperson for the (we) group and thus serves to locate twins within one indiscernible, unnamed, objectified unit. This obviously has resonance with the dominant stereotype of (identical) twinship, something which many of the older child twins tried to resist. Hence, in most cases, the plural pronoun ‘we’ denoted the common and simultaneous experience of togetherness: ‘we put a show on’ (Peter, aged 13); ‘at school we do rugby’ (Dan, aged 17); ‘we used to climb over chairs and stuff’ (Olivia, aged 16). Although we are inclined to think of the two bodies acting separately but simultaneously, this imagery also conjures up a picture of conjoined twins: two bodies connected to each other. For instance, in Olivia’s account, it is the singular unit containing the two twins (the ‘we’ group) that climbs over the chairs. We do not know where one twin ends and the other begins. There is no ‘he’ to mark out Adam and no ‘I’ to mark out Olivia. Indeed, within the ‘we-self’ there is no self and no Other. Given this, the plural pronoun

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could also facilitate the narration of shared life experience stemming from this togetherness: ‘we had this teacher’ (Ian, aged 13); ‘we have to share a room’ (Hannah, aged 15); ‘when we went to secondary school we were kept in the same class’ (Anne, aged 24). A similar theme of embodied connectedness is also continued when twins use this pronoun to express a shared point of view. For instance, Ruth explained that ‘we don’t think its fair that John always like gets things more than we do’ and Sally (aged 20) said ‘we didn’t like the thought of being on our own’. Twins also used this pronoun to describe an episode of talk: ‘we say “yeah”’ (Peter); ‘we say, “oh you don’t want a twin” ’ (Emma). This linguistic device can therefore help to imply that twins share thoughts. Thus, as was the case with the ‘Rugrats’ twins ‘Phil’ and ‘Lil’ described in Chapter 2, we can imagine a thought bubble appearing between the two twins’ bodies. Related to this, it can also help to imply a sense of shared knowledge; one twin knows what the other twin’s opinion is and can therefore act as spokesperson. Finally, such pluralised accounts of talk can also help to assert that the ‘we’ group speaks as one unit: in unison. This pronoun was also sometimes used by some twins (especially the youngest twins and the adult twins) to explain their similarities: thus, Ash (aged eight) said ‘we’re both the same, noisy and quiet’; Rebecca (aged 23) explained ‘we’ve got a soft heart’; and Sally (aged 20) said ‘we’re very people person’. Again this pronoun says more than is actually spoken. In the last two examples, it does far more than simply highlight similarity. Implicit is the suggestion that each twin is not a discretely embodied subject, but rather is so inextricably connected to their twin sister that their embodied experiences of who they are cannot be detached. The mixing of the plural pronoun with a singular tense only serves to reinforce this. As such, Rebecca’s assertion that ‘we’ve got a soft heart’ serves to imply they have one heart between them and Sally’s assertion that ‘we’re very people person’ again unites both Sally and Rachel as one singular person. Within these contexts, then, the plural pronoun ‘we’ joins twins together as one unit in slightly different ways, whether that be in terms of shared thoughts, shared knowledge, joint action or common experience. By utilising the ‘we’ pronoun, twins speak as this objectified unit and unknowingly practise ‘twin’ identity (displays of twoness and connectedness) in the act of talking. For the older child twins, the plural pronoun ‘we’ often conveyed alternative messages to those they actually wanted to convey through the content of their talk. Indeed, in some situations, this plural pronoun

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quite literally interrupted attempts to construct the self as a unique individual. For example, in her account of what life would be like without a twin sister, Hannah (aged 15) wrote: If I wasn’t a twin […] we’d be more individual because people think that we like and do the same things just because were twins but were the exact opposite from each other. Thankgod. Through the notion of opposites, Hannah tries to present herself as different from Charlotte and as someone who does not fall easily within the stereotype of twinship. Yet, paradoxically, the plural pronoun ‘we’ interrupts the flow of this assertion and serves to reposition her as part of a dyadic unit. Although she is trying to say ‘I would be seen to be more different from her’, what she actually says is ‘we’d be more individual’. It is difficult to prise apart Hannah from Charlotte within this statement, even though this is what she is trying to achieve. The implication is that they, as one unit, would be more individual to other people. Similarly, it was in protesting against the significance that twinship had for him that Liam also inadvertently concealed his own singularity: Liam: I don’t think there’s too much to it [being a twin], if you’ve got it … er … you forget about it, we never really cared, we were never really impressed. Although he begins his protest by stating his own opinion (‘I don’t think’), he moves on to speak as part of the we-group. The implication from the latter is that Liam and Dan have one opinion and one thought process. Without intention or desire, these twins therefore momentarily display a convincing performance of partnership that undermines their attempts to position themselves as separate and unique persons. We will see more examples of this later in this chapter. Referring to the self as one part of the twin dyad In some cases, this embodied connectedness was reflected in the ways in which twins variously referred to themselves and each other as ‘one of us’ or ‘two of us’. For instance: Adam: [In the event of not completing homework] Olivia may use one excuse and I may use another and it may be that one of us gets away with it and one of us doesn’t.

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Ruth: […] Like say one of us was cooking dinner, we like go and help. Here the dyadic unit (us) is embodied in each twin so that one twin equals one ‘us’. This utterance not only symbolically constructs twins as simultaneously singular and plural, but also implies a sense of sameness; the first ‘us’ is an identical carbon copy of the second ‘us’. Ruth’s utterance is particularly interesting, in that it also demonstrates how the ‘we’ group can be substituted for the singular person. Although Ruth intends to describe a situation where each twin acts as a singular and separate person (one helping the other out), she actually implies that one exists inside the other. The person cooking dinner is one of the two ‘us’ and the person going to help is ‘both’ of them. On one occasion, Ian and Peter utilised a more particular and ambiguous naming strategy: Kate: I was going to ask you to draw a picture of yourself, do you want to do that? Peter: Yeah. Ian: Yeah, what of? Kate: You. Peter: Of ourself? Ian: Ourself. The opening question is framed with a view to addressing each twin singularly but simultaneously. Whilst this seems to cause confusion (possibly due to the fact that this pronoun can be used in the first, second and third person), what is interesting is that Peter chooses to clear this up by utilising the equally ambiguous notion of ‘ourself’ rather than asking if the picture should be of ‘me’ or ‘me and my brother’. In this moment of talk, Peter, followed by Ian, implies that they share one self; they are simultaneously singular and plural. Any distinction between self and Other is thus impossible. After Ian and Peter chose their paper and pens, Ian tried to clarify the point again: Ian: Are we drawing pictures of ourself or opposites? Here, ‘ourself’ seems to refer to ‘himself’ and ‘opposites’ to a picture of them both together. But, once again, the singularity of the self is lost. This is especially interesting given that, as we saw in Chapter 4, Peter said he disliked wearing the ‘same’ clothes as his brother because ‘people treat you more like one person’.

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Authoritative voices and co-construction Some twins also spoke on behalf of or as their fellow twin: Ian: If we go to draw something, it sometimes will be that Peter’d draw a clown or something, and erm … I’d like … Peter: Design something. Although Ian’s use of the ‘we’ pronoun suggests that they draw as one unit, Ian tries to differentiate himself from his brother. He does this by speaking on behalf of Peter (‘Peter’d draw a clown’) and then turning to focus on how he thinks he is different (‘I’d like …’). Hence, although he attempts to distinguish himself from his brother, he positions himself as an authority on him. At the end of the extract, Peter actually positions himself as Ian by taking up and continuing his position as speaker. Other examples of this emerged within the context of the joint interviews: Kate: Why do you like your soft toys then Ash? Ash: Because they always keep me company when I’m– Harry: [Interrupts] Sad. Although Ash begins to answer, Harry steps in to speak on his behalf, positioning himself as Ash. Similarly, when I asked Emma about the things she was interested in, her sister Ruth stepped in to answer as Emma: Kate: What sort of things do you like then? [To Emma] Emma: Erm … more like, … Ruth: Jamie Lee. An important aspect of these narratives is that they all entail ‘coconstruction’ (Cheshire, 2000: 242) . Co-construction involves narrators working together to create one single account. Speakers may therefore create a seamless flow of talk where one person’s contribution leads on to the next. These ‘duets’ of talk mean that narrators are able to function as a single speaker (Coates, 2003: 177). Thus, in the examples above, Emma and Ruth function as Emma, and Ash and Harry as Ash. It is this that serves to imply that the twins are interchangeable in some sense. Hence, if I want to know how Ash feels, I can ask Harry, and if I want to know what Emma is interested in, I can ask Ruth. However, Emma and Ruth in particular disliked it when members of their family

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or friends at school treated them as if they were interchangeable. Emma explained her frustration at getting told off by her parents just because her sister Ruth had done something wrong: ‘if I [didn’t] do anything but I was still with her I’d still get told off.’ Furthermore, as we saw in Chapter 4, both Emma and Ruth explained that they did not like it when friends called them by the wrong name. Taken together, these extracts therefore show that even where twins dislike being treated like ‘twins’ and work to present themselves as discretely embodied persons, they may still fall into forms of talk that actually perpetuate stereotypes of interchangeability and connectedness. Even though twins take an active role in presenting particular versions of self, they are also often unaware of the symbolic content of their utterances and sometimes inadvertently contradict the very presentations they are trying to successfully pull off. It seems that, without even knowing it, twins momentarily affirm and reaffirm their status as one unit, as two parts of a whole and as carbon copies. These are all aspects of the dominant cultural stereotype of twinship, a stereotype which many of the older child twins also actively tried to resist.

Suspending performances of identity In some cases, however, the older twins momentarily relocated themselves within the twin dyad and thus used talk to symbolically reunite themselves with their fellow twins. For instance, occasionally Charlotte would align herself to her twin sister Hannah in a bid to profess her difference from her younger sister Ellie. In her separate interview, Charlotte openly explained ‘I don’t get on with Ellie at all’ and branded her ‘childish’. In line with this, she sometimes positioned herself alongside her twin sister when speaking about Ellie: ‘if sommat’s gone missing or sommat, me and Hannah’ll think that it’s her and we’ll tell my mum.’ In this utterance, Ellie is isolated from the partnership (‘me and Hannah’). A similar sentiment is carried by Hannah’s assertion that ‘we’re older’. Thus, although these twins wanted to symbolically detach themselves from each other, they may also momentarily reunite in order to show up their status as older children and thereby resist the stigma of being associated with being younger. On other occasions, twins may move from speaking as a singularly embodied person to a ‘plural’ anonymous entity in order to talk positively about the self. For Liam, this sometimes occurred in relation to narrating his academic ability. Although he was often very adamant

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that Dan was the ‘academic’ one, he still seemed offended by other people’s characterisations of him as the ‘less academic twin’: Liam: I think my grandma and grandpa still think that Dan’s quite a lot more intelligent than I am … in a different context … I don’t know. I think quite a few people underestimate me […]. Earlier on in this separate interview he also explained that ‘we’re not that different in academic [ability]’. By utilising the ‘we’ pronoun, Liam momentarily positions himself alongside his brother and makes his brother’s achievements inseparable and undetectable from his own. Related to this, in some cases, re-establishing unity in talk can enable twins to boast about themselves without appearing to be arrogant. For example: Ian: We’ve had [roller] blades before and we’re really good on them. Peter: We’ve had– Ian: You jumped something about this high, like off the ground. I did this. [He demonstrates how high he jumped with his hands] In the first line of speech, Ian casually introduces that they are both good on roller blades and this serves to play down any sense in which he might be seen to be bragging about himself. This then opens the conversation up to discussing their achievements. However, importantly, Ian speaks on behalf of Peter in order to further diffuse any impression of self-obsessiveness. Although twins may use talk to set themselves up in opposition to their fellow twin, on other occasions, twins may use talk to momentarily reposition the self alongside their fellow twin. Thus, Liam also regrouped himself inside the dyadic unit to situate himself within the reputation of being ‘academic’. Charlotte identified herself with Hannah in a bid to distance herself from her younger sister Ellie and, by utilising the plural pronoun and an authoritative voice, Ian was able to disguise his self-talk behind the guise of ‘praise’ and adoration.

Twin talk? So, how far can these forms of talk be said to be specific to twins? The short answer to this question is that I do not think all these modes of talk are specific to twins. One aspect of talk that may be more particular

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to twins is the public repertories of talk conducted with strangers. Other people’s relationships rarely come under such public scrutiny. Questions about their closeness and intimacy would more likely be considered a breach of ‘privacy’. However, since, as Chapter 2 pointed out, twins arouse our sense of awe and fascination, promising what we all want (in terms of emotional closeness and understanding), so they become a source of public intrigue and are thus potentially accessible by ‘strangers’. Other modes of talk such as contrast, use of the ‘we’ pronoun, co-construction and authoritative voices are all things which may be identified with sibling relationships more broadly and some of them with romantic relationships too. Thus, Mauthner (1998) found that sisters may finish each other’s sentences and possess intimate knowledge about each other’s lives. Moreover, like twins, they may utilise discourses of ‘best friendship’ to help them to narrate their experiences (Mauthner, 2000). Siblings may also be quite intent on differentiating themselves from each other in order to emphasise difference and the desire for separation (see Edwards et al., 2006: 47). Coates (2003) found that heterosexual couples also sometimes spoke using the plural pronoun ‘we’ and co-constructed collaborative narratives. As she notes, these modes of talk are ‘characteristic of people who know each other well’ (Coates, 2003: 176). Certainly this is a finding supported by my own discussions with parents of twins, who, like the twins themselves, often spoke as ‘one unit’. For example, David said ‘we don’t want them to stay at their present school’; Jonathan explained ‘we feel [Brian] devoted his weekends to consuming as many different cocktails as humanly possible’; Pam said ‘we couldn’t sort of split them and we never have’; and Jenny admitted ‘we know that we can’t make them alike’. These styles of talk served to imply a ‘united front’: that parents constitute one unit of consensual voices. As was the case with the twins, these modes of talking also seemed like ‘second nature’ to the parents. Yet, as we have already said, some of these modes of talk may take on more significance for twins because they, unlike singleton siblings, face stereotypes which deny them their individuality and which thus also potentially deny their personhood and obstruct their pathway towards claiming full ‘adult’ status. Contrast and difference may therefore become even more significant as resources for challenging such assumptions. But what of those less conscious or unconscious modes of talk: how can we explain the prevalence of these amongst twins and others too?

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Habitus: talk as second nature Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, specifically linguistic habitus, provides some useful insights in this respect. The habitus constitutes a set of dispositions which generate particular modes of acting, speaking and thinking (McNay, 1999: 100). According to Bourdieu, we each embody a set of ‘durable, transposable dispositions’ (obtained through experience and teaching/socialisation) which we bring to social situations and use to produce social practices (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). We are therefore rarely conscious of the habitus. Instead, the habitus provides us with a ‘feel for the game’ of social life that becomes almost second nature (Wolfreys, 2000). Linguistic habitus ‘implies a certain propensity to speak and to say determinate things’ (Bourdieu, 1992: 37). Because the habitus is formed unconsciously, the symbolic content of utterances may not be consciously articulated. As Bourdieu states, ‘it is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know’ (1990: 69). Importantly, the habitus is intrinsically ‘social’, that is, it emerges from social relationships and social and material conditions. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 13) argue, it is the ‘cumulative exposure to certain social conditions [that] instils in individuals an ensemble of durable and transposable dispositions’. For many of these twins, this involved being placed together (at home and at school) as young children. Within these contexts, twins acquire shared experiences and construct shared knowledge of each other (sometimes to the point of irritation!). These experiences, I would argue, are then externalised, as a kind of ‘second nature’, through their talk. Such forms of talk like the ‘we-self’ thus reflect back the social and material circumstances of their own making and carry forth messages of identity (about who we are and the social experiences we have had) which may not be consciously performed. As Jenks notes: … language can be considered as a habitus – certain ways of speech provide for membership of particular communities. These forms of speech which instance membership, are far more than mere media for communication – they speak more than they can say. Such forms of speech are totemic, they are emblems, they symbolise the particular group […] (Jenks, 1993: 14). Symbolised through the image of identical twins, twinship is an identity characterised by ‘twoness’, ‘togetherness’ and ‘sameness’. ‘Totemic’

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forms of ‘twin talk’ would therefore include those that encapsulate these various expressions of connectedness. In this chapter, we have witnessed how twins can unknowingly identify themselves as ‘twins’ by utilising such totemic styles of talk. However, given that linguistic habitus emerges from the social spaces we move in, it is not surprising that other people (like siblings and romantic partners) who also spend large amounts of time together and therefore have time and space to develop shared knowledge also employ similar modes of talk which also embrace notions of twoness, togetherness and connectedness. Moreover, given the deep-rooted nature of the habitus, it is also no surprise that adult twins continue to speak in ways which reflect these ‘social conditions’, even though they may have (to a greater extent) given up on ‘doing’ twinship, and aspects of the material contexts within which these modes of talk emerged (for instance, being in the same classes, sharing a room and wearing the same clothes) have now changed. Through his notion of the ‘Don Quixote effect’, Bourdieu acknowledges that (even though the habitus may be modified through the experiences we have) a ‘disjuncture may occur between the practices generated by the habitus and the objective conditions required for their outlet’ (May, 1996: 127). This linguistic habitus, then, while providing the structure for speaking, also restricts the extent to which identity can be managed and controlled through talk. In adulthood, twins do not simply stop speaking as ‘twins’, that is, in ways which symbolically reaffirm their two-ness. On the contrary, these findings also support the prevalence of the ‘we’ pronoun within their talk. Thus, as well as being resources for presenting the self in particular ways, language and talk are also socialised systems of symbols that provide actors with some limitations.

Talking as a resource for performing identity Talk can be both enabling and constraining. Talk can help twins to compose and perform particular versions of self whilst also limiting the success of these performances. Twins may therefore use talk to play up and play down their similarities and differences, and to variously take up or resist their identities as twins. Yet, although the content of their talk may convey certain messages about who they are (and are not), their occasional slips of the tongue and seemingly unconscious modes of speaking may serve to undermine these. Although many aspects of the twins’ talk (such as speaking in the plural pronoun ‘we’ and co-construction) cannot be labelled as ‘twin talk’ (in the sense that they

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only apply to twins), these public routines of talk seem more particular to twins and reflect the public intrigue surrounding them.

Note 1. Ortmeyer (1970) analysed the talk of one identical twin psychotherapy patient and coined the term ‘we-self’ to depict the psychological unity of two personalities functioning as one (1970: 125). As he put it, the ‘we-self’ refers to a situation whereby ‘one twin … does not effectively develop his personality potential in certain areas where his twin has developed; yet he functions as though he has done just that’ (1970: 126). Here, I invest this term with a different set of meanings and use it to achieve different ends. Within the context of this chapter, the ‘we-self’ constitutes a particular mode of representing the self in talk which utilises the plural pronoun ‘we’ and which may not be consciously articulated.

7 Conclusions: Moving Through Life as a Twin

The aim of this book has been to reveal and investigate the social character of twinship. Twins, like the rest of us, live in society. Twinship is therefore an identity that is informed by the broader cultural contexts within which twins live out their lives and an identity that has to be established and validated through social interaction. In performing their identities, twins variously reproduce, reject, resist and reconfigure dominant discourses of twinship. As such, twins have a role to play in constructing twinship. Yet, although twins may utilise the resources of their bodies, space and talk to help them to activate particular versions of identity, the relative success of their impression management will depend on how far external others are prepared to endorse and legitimise their versions of identity. Twins therefore live out their lives in various enabling and constraining contexts.

The social construction of twinship and childhood Within Western societies like the UK, the USA and Australia, twinship is largely constructed in terms of three dominant discourses: sameness, togetherness and closeness. Twins are thus expected to look the same, to spend their time together and to have a close relationship with one another. Identical twins, representing the very epitome of twinship, come to stand for all twins. Insomuch as they are thought to possess these qualities, ‘twins’ constitute a concentrated version of ‘ordinary’ siblingship. Hence, in our society, being a twin also means being something more than a sibling. Discourses of childhood run parallel to discourses of twinship, helping to suggest that being a twin also implies a sense of being a ‘child’. Whilst children are constructed as dependent beings in the process 190

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of becoming fully formed individuals, twins are said to constitute a dyadic unit that lacks individuality and independence. As they ‘grow up’, children are socially expected to develop into persons by establishing a clear sense of self and independence from their parents. Stereotypes of twinship and childhood therefore place twins in an especially contradictory relationship with cultural ideals of ‘full’ personhood. While twins are carbon copies who lack individuality, they must achieve a sense of bodily distinctiveness and uniqueness; while they are said to share a ‘special’ mutually interdependent relationship, they are expected to separate from each other as well as their parents. In these ways, twinship, I argue, represents an intensification of the symbol of the child and, in line with this, is therefore discursively constructed (by ‘experts’, parents and twins) as something that children should (in the main) grow out of. These social expectations allows us to see, as if in magnified detail, the contours and limits of personhood which in turn help to mark out childhood as a specific social space within the life course. Put another way, it is because twins are expected to leave behind aspects of their twinship in pursuit of adult personhood that twinship shows up the symbolic boundary separating childhood from adulthood. Importantly, central to this understanding of how twins should grow up is a conceptualisation of the life course as a series of fixed stages. Thus, as Hockey and James (2003: 57) note, ‘the more rigid pattern of the modern Western life course which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century [still] continues to occupy a hegemonic position’.

Performing ‘twinship’ While these social expectations and stereotypes provide a structuring context within which twins live out their lives, twins have a part to play in perpetuating ideas about twins; through their words and actions, they participate in the social construction of ‘twinship’. Many of the twins in my study resisted notions of twin sameness and thus drew attention to the mismatch between cultural definitions of twinship and what it was like for them. Ruth and Emma resisted assumptions that they dressed the same and acted the same. Ian explained that although there is a ‘law’ that twins dress the same, he did not like to. Charlotte and Hannah, and Liam and Dan placed themselves outside of the category of ‘twins’, preferring to refer to themselves as ‘sisters’/‘brothers’, and many of these twins also explained how they had ‘split up’ or tried to carve out their own ‘personal(ised)’ space. In some respects,

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different-sex twins Adam and Olivia were less adamant about resisting stereotypes of twinship. Adam explained that Olivia sometimes wore his clothes and, like the youngest twins, both pinpointed togetherness as a defining feature of their experience of being twins. However, whilst on the one hand, these different-sex twins may be less at risk of being cast off as ‘failed’ individuals because they look so different, they may still be stigmatised for their togetherness. Their friends ‘get really weird’ when ‘they’ tell them they share a room, reflecting the social unease surrounding fears of incest. On one level, then, a general pattern has emerged whereby the youngest children were more likely to identify themselves as twins by drawing attention to or playing up aspects of ‘twinship’ than the older children. For the older children, being an ‘individual’ takes on added significance and helps to signify that they are growing up successfully. Thus, it is evident that twinship loses some of its salience as twins get older, further confirming the cultural matching of twinship and childhood and the sense in which twinship may be conceptualised as a social space within the life course. Of course, also obscured within this general pattern are the ways in which twin identity may be periodically taken up and abandoned. Twins do not simply move from being twins to becoming adults. Although some of the adult twins recalled how they did not like to dress alike, they also explained how they would occasionally still do this. Importantly, however, this was presented as a non-serious and non-permanent activity. Twins may also perform their identities in different ways in different socio-spatial contexts. For instance, although the youngest twins engaged in activities together within the home, Harry in particular also tried to establish some sense of independence whilst at school. During the course of their everyday lives, twins move in and out of twinship, returning to take up expressions of sameness as ‘just a laugh’, facilitating companionship and telling others they are twins. They may trade on assumptions of interchangeability to maintain friendships or to obtain ‘personal’ information about their fellow twin. In some situations, twins may miss the attention they once obtained for being twins and may therefore actively encourage others to identify them as ‘twins’. Not only does this reveal the fluid nature of twins’ identities, it also tells us something about the nature of their social relationships with each other, relationships which are characterised by ambivalence. Thus, whilst older twins may register the need to have their ‘own space’, they still seek each other out for comfort and companionship in times of need. Rather than being timeless and fixed, twins’ relationships (like

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singleton siblings’ relationships) are changeable. In line with this, power dynamics do not remain the same over time. Rather, the twins’ accounts suggest that even though one twin may be identified as the instigator of some social changes, power is contested, resisted and negotiated. Power relations, then, do not only exist between parents and children, they also exist between children themselves. The temptation to move back into aspects of twinship seems to increase in adulthood. No longer expected to be ‘twins’, adults may cling on to aspects of twin identity to reaffirm their status as twins. The extraordinariness of this identity and the sense of ‘being special’ that it produces may be difficult to give up. Narratives of twin closeness may therefore take on a new significance for older child and adult twins as a means of communicating twin identity. Because this potentially allows twins to confirm their ‘exotic’ status whilst still implying a sense of their uniqueness and independence, this may be one way in which twins can maintain their status as individuals, whilst still playing up their identity as twins. Female twins in particular may be more able to cling on to aspects of twinship and the symbolic and social capital potentially available through playing up closeness, because expressions of twin closeness fall in line with discourses of femininity. Twins, both young and older, may play an active part in securing (or not) their own and each other’s social capital. This provides a critique of much social theorising on the family and social capital, which tends to emphasise the role that parents play in forming social networks and how these various social relationships influence the child’s life chances (see Hogan, 2001). Here children tend to be positioned as the consumers of social capital. As Edwards states, ‘absent are conceptions of children as active participants in … gathering social capital for themselves, parents and other family members’ (Edwards, 2004: 8). However, in this book we have seen how Hannah and Charlotte introduced themselves as twins to their friends and chose to wear similar tops at their birthday party, and also how some twins named their twin’s ‘best’ or closest friends as their own friends. One’s status as ‘twin’ may therefore be used as a focus for social interaction and for securing access to a broader range of friends.

Opportunities and constraints Twins’ identity work has to be viewed as combining elements of both opportunity and constraint. This book has examined this mixture of opportunity and constraint in relation to the internal-external

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dialectic of identification and the mutual constitution of structure and agency. Hence, although twins may manage their presentations of self, it is never enough to simply assert an identity, because that identity has to be validated by others. Whilst structuring forces (like cultural discourses and parent-child relations) help to shape twins’ social experiences, they also provide twins with various resources and opportunities for constructing their own identities and thus for shaping broader cultural understandings of twinship. This study has shown that parents, especially mothers, take a lead role in directing their children’s childhood, preparing their children’s bodies for public presentation and providing them with various spatial contexts (both at home and, with some help from teachers, at school) within which to negotiate their identities. The analysis presented in Chapter 3 showed that, on the whole, parents want their children to be twins before they ‘grow up’; they encourage their young children to be together and to look the same or similar. The power parents have in shaping and controlling the form and content of their children’s childhoods means that children tend to only opt out of these decisions later on, when they are deemed competent enough to make self-determined choices. As such, children may spend their early childhoods within spatial contexts that encourage embodied expressions of twinship. In this sense, parents may encourage their children to take on various embodied ways of being, such as looking the same and being together. However, twins also have a vital role to play in shaping their own identities. This book has shown how, in making their own choices about how to dress, older children actively resisted their parents’ earlier attempts to inscribe practices of twinship into their everyday actions. Similarly, even where older twins were placed together in one room, they sometimes changed the shape of this space, transforming it into two separate places and challenging stereotypes of twin unity by literally marking themselves out as two separate individuals. However, Chapter 6 showed that twins may find it difficult to completely exit practices of twinship. Through talk, their past ‘childhood’ may be continued into the present, so that even where the actual conditions for the production of linguistic habitus may have all but disappeared (with adult twins living apart from each other), the seemingly unconscious modes of talk that have (at least in part) emerged out of them still persist. Bodies, space and talk are therefore both enabling and limiting resources. Certainly, we cannot necessarily simply (immediately) be

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anyone we choose to be. For instance, although we may work on our bodies to present ourselves as particular sorts of people, these ‘body projects’ (Shilling, 2003: 188) may be restricted or delayed by the physicality of the body. This study has shown that because twinship is chiefly defined through bodily sameness, identical-looking twins may find it more difficult to escape being publicly identified as ‘twins’, their bodies communicating messages of identity on their behalf. For these twins, as Chapter 5 discussed, space may be an effective resource in helping them to escape from being ‘known’ as twins, providing distance for them to ‘split up’ and conceal any embodied expressions of sameness. Because identical twins have come to symbolise twinship, on the one hand, different-looking twins (especially different-sex twins) may find it easier to exit their twin identities whilst, on the other hand, they may also find it more difficult to ‘pass’ as twins, something they may need to do in order to justify their status as ‘twins’ and claim any symbolic capital available for having a ‘special’ relationship. Of course, if twins are to pull off a convincing presentation of difference, they have to work together. As Chapter 4 pointed out, twins cannot be successful in their presentation of difference if they choose to be different in the same ways. Twins therefore manage each other’s bodies and also try to socialise each other into knowing the precise dimensions of where these differences lie. Chapter 5 took the spatialisation of identity as its focus point. The analysis of children’s bedrooms showed that the ‘separate’ room may provide older child twins with the opportunity to locate expressions of individuality within a bounded space and help twins to secure some control over their personal space and property. In contrast, many of the older twins who shared a room spoke of the frustrations and irritations this brought. Yet, although twins may feel that their autonomy is restricted (for instance, because they cannot always do what they want to do without some negotiation), they also provide each other with valuable human resources for locating and identifying the beginning and end points of the self. Twins may therefore provide each other with certain opportunities and constraints. Aside from the twins themselves, others also have a role to play in legitimising or challenging the displays of identity on show. External others may not interpret twins’ bedroom space in the same way or verify their spatial presentations of self. Thus, even though Charlotte and Hannah split their room up into two sides, conveying a sense of their detachment from each other, Ellie (their sister) saw their shared room as further confirmation of their twin togetherness and her isolation from it.

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In this sense, Ellie did not verify Hannah and Charlotte’s version of identity that they inscribed into the space of their bedroom. Chapter 6 explored the opportunities and constraints of talk. Twins use certain modes of talk to describe who they are (and are not). One the whole, these modes of talk did seem to affirm the messages of identity being conveyed through the content of talk. For instance, for many of the older child twins, the technique of contrast helped them to communicate messages of ‘difference’. Yet, despite this, some styles of talk seemed far less conscious and occasionally undermined the messages of identity the twins wanted to display.

‘Twin’ experience? Whilst this book has explored the lives and perspectives of twins and parents of twins, it has also pointed to how twins may have things in common with siblings and children more generally. For instance, older children (who are not twins) may want their own space and may not like looking the same as other people. Like the twins in this study, they negotiate their identities against the same backdrop of cultural understandings of how children should grow up. However, whilst we may not be able to label these things as aspects of a ‘twin experience’, confined to twins alone, these things may be experienced differently by twins and non-twins precisely because twins, by virtue of the cultural construction of twinship, are positioned in a more contradictory relationship to adulthood. Thus, whilst it may be common for children to want to express their individuality as they get older, and for parents to provide opportunities for them to do so, difference may take on particular significance in the context of twinship because ‘twins’ are presumed to be carbon copies of each other, as well as children who are ‘developing’ individuals. Similarly, whilst it may be common for children to want their own space as they get older, this may take on added significance for twins, because ‘twins’ are expected to be ‘joined at the hip’ as well as dependent on their parents. Moreover, as we have seen, togetherness can also temporarily bring any sameness into public view. Some of the experiences reported in this book may, then, have resonance with other siblings and other parents. Yet, whilst these experiences may not differ in their general character, they may differ in degree. Children may want to become different in pursuit of the adult ideal of individuality but child twins, faced with stereotypes of sameness, may need to go to extra lengths to achieve this, especially if their

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bodies look physically alike. Parents may want their children to grow up to become independent and unique persons but, because they, unlike other parents, are faced with stereotypes of twin sameness, they emphasise the extent to which their own children contravene these. In short, when considering the commonalities between twins and non-twins, parents of twins and parents in general, it is the cultural construction of twinship which makes the experience of being twins and being parents of twins potentially different in degree rather than character. Aside from this, there are instances where the experiences of twins and parents of twins may be more specific to them – that is, these experiences are wholly related to their being classified as twins or parents of twins. For instance, Chapter 3 examined public reactions to identical looking twins and Chapter 6 noted how public strangers may engage twins in repertories of twinship. Of course, this is not to say that siblings who look very alike and parents of siblings who look very alike could not receive the same kind of attention from strangers. Following the logic of this book, they potentially could because, in essence, they would be publically recognised, classified and reacted to as if they were ‘twins’ or parents of ‘twins’.

Children, agency and the social study of childhood Children are not the passive recipients of adult socialisation. Although traditional socialisation theories and studies of the ‘environmental’ influences on twins have pinpointed how parents shape children’s and twins’ social lives, this study has drawn attention to the work that children do in performing their own identities. Although it is essential that we take account of how adult-child relations frame and structure the identity work of twins, it is also important to acknowledge that children actively display and execute their own identities. In managing their own bodies and the spaces within which these bodies move, twins participate in resisting, modifying and reproducing cultural notions of twinship. Therefore, children do not passively absorb cultural information, but actively participate in the making of social life and the social structures that emerge from and through it. As such, this book offers an active perspective on twinship. It tells us something about the character of twinship and also of ‘childhood’. In utilising a life course perspective, it allows us to glimpse the ways in which twins conceptualise their experiences as young children, teenagers

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and adults. Indeed, not only do twins’ performances of identity show how they actively position themselves in relation to the dominant discourses of twinship, they also demonstrate how twins, as both children and as twins, variously locate themselves along the trajectory towards ‘adulthood’. This study, then, reveals the various levels of consistency and contradiction between twinship, childhood and adulthood, and makes visible the boundaries which mark out childhood as a specific period within the life course.

Appendix A: Methodology The main aim of the study that underpins this book was to explore how twins negotiated their identities across the life course. In order to explore this, I had to gain access to twins of different ages and also to other people who interacted with twins. To this end, I chose to speak with child and adult twins as well as the parents and siblings of the child twins. Since the child twins were the main focus of the study and since they still lived at home, it seemed fitting that I should explore some aspects of the family context by speaking with other members of their families. Ultimately, this was largely parents of twins. I advertised the research by speaking with friends who knew twins or parents of twins. I also placed adverts and information leaflets around the university where I was studying, in coffee shops, doctor’s surgeries, post offices, charity shops, community centres and also in a local paper. Because I realised that the latter would possibly attract more adults than children, I also then contacted 11 different schools in my local area to ask if I could speak with the pupils about the research. Because of their busy work schedules, only one school organised for me to talk with the pupils. I also contacted TAMBA (the Twins and Multiple Births Association) and placed an advert on the ace-babes website (an organisation that provides parents of children born through assisted conception with help and support). In the end, the twins were largely found with the help of TAMBA, friends and a newspaper advert. Forty-one people took part in this UK-based study. This included 21 twins (12 child and nine adult twins), 15 parents of twins and five siblings of twins. This study therefore mainly focuses on the accounts provided by the twins and the parents of twins. Only two of the twins were sure that they were identical twins. Five twins were unsure of their zygosity but thought that they were more likely to be identical twins and looked very alike (as such, these twins are referred to as ‘identical-looking’ twins throughout this book). Fourteen twins (two-thirds of the sample) were non-identical, so the study is primarily about non-identical twins, with identical twins providing a comparative perspective. Most of the twins were same-sex twins; only five of the twins were different-sex twins.1 Most of the twins were also either older children (teenagers aged 13–17) or young adults (aged 18–24). Only two twins were young children (aged eight) and only two adults were aged over 24 (one aged 32 and one aged 36). There were nine male twins and 12 female twins. All the participants were white. The sample included participants from strands of both the working class and middle class (based on parental occupation). However, as the research questions below indicate, the study was not designed as a social class based analysis of twinship (see Table A.1 for the list of participants and Chapter 3 and Appendix B for a more detailed overview of the parents and twins who took part). At the start of the empirical research, I held introductory meetings with the families and adult twins to ensure they knew what the research was about and what to expect if they took part. This was vital in ascertaining their initial

199

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Appendix A

Table A.1

List of participants

Twins

Age

Ash Harry

8 8

Ian Peter

Zygosity

Parent/s

Sibling/s

Social class1

Non-identical Clare Anthony

Working class

13 13

Unsure

*

Emma Ruth

13 13

Unsure

Hannah Charlotte

15 15

Adam Olivia

Sue Stuart

John (aged 16)

Working class

Non-identical Caroline (also an adult lone twin)

Ellie (aged 12)

Working class

16 16

Non-identical Janet David

Craig (aged 25) Middle class Naomi (aged 24)

Liam Dan

17 17

Non-identical Allison Mike

Middle class

Sally Rachel

20 20

Non-identical

*

Justin

22

Non-identical

Rebecca Andrea

23 23

Identical

Middle class

Anne Brian

24 24

Non-identical Cheryl Jonathan

Caroline

32

Unsure (lone twin)

Jennifer

36

Non-identical

Pam Malcolm

Middle class Roger (aged 19)

Working class Working class

Lindsey (adopting non-identical twin boys aged 4) Jenny (mother of non-identical different-sex twins aged 3)

* Middle class

Middle class

1 Based on the occupational groupings outlined in the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification. ‘Long-term unemployed’ is included in the main ‘working class’ category. * Some of the parental occupations were not obtained.

informed consent. However, this also had to be established throughout the research. As the research process unfolded I settled on three research questions: (i) What does it mean to be a ‘twin’? (ii) How do twins conceptualise and perform their identities? (iii) To what extent can twins shape or exit their identities as ‘twins’? Two main theoretical views thus underpinned my approach to conducting the research. Firstly, social meanings are created and built up through the course of everyday social life. This kind of assumption stems from symbolic interactionism (a theoretical sociological perspective) and falls in line with a social

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constructionist standpoint (see Waskul, 2009). Typically, sociology has concerned itself with exploring how adults make sense of the world in which they live; however, this research places children at the centre of its analysis. The main aim, then, was to examine how child twins experienced twinship and how their accounts compared with the adult twins. The second important theoretical perspective that informed how I designed and carried out the study was that children should be considered to be competent social actors who, like adults, have a role to play in shaping and participating in society (Prout and James, 1997). Given this, it was vital that I chose methods of data collection that could put children at their ease and allow them the time and space to voice their opinions in their own words. To this end, I chose to use semi-structured interviews, interviewing most family members within their own homes, and a range of participatory techniques including drawings, vignettes, photos and an openended self-return task (which asked twins and siblings what life would be like if they weren’t twins or siblings of twins). One family, however, did not want to be interviewed and preferred to receive a questionnaire. In this instance, I used the general interview schedule to design an open-ended questionnaire where respondents could write their own accounts in their own words. One of the adult twins also preferred to fill out the questionnaire. Other families allowed me to spend a great deal of time with them at home. On one occasion, I was invited to one of the siblings’ school Christmas play. Thus, although limited, I was able to record some observational notes alongside the interviews and I have utilised these from time to time to add further detail and contextualisation. I chose to interview the child twins together and apart, to allow them the opportunity to talk about more sensitive issues in private whilst still being able to examine how they interacted with each other. It was hoped that interviewing them together would help to put the children at their ease. Some child twins just took part in the joint interview, whilst others also had separate interviews. The adult twins were only interviewed separately. Many did not live at their parental home or together. Given the small sample size and the complexity of the sample composition, the aim was not to make sweeping generalisations. Although the sample diversity does allow us some insight into the significance that social class, gender and age has in these twins’ lives, the impact of these cannot be fully explored in order to generalise about the twin population at large. Notwithstanding this, the experiences reported here may resonate with some other twins’ experiences and, as such, the findings represented in this book could be transferable outside of this specific research context. Ultimately, this account of twinship is mediated through my own interpretations that cannot be divorced from my identity as a female adult twin, and the ways in which these aspects of my subjectivity mix with those of the participants. The notion of positionality forces us to consider the situatedness of knowledge, that is, that knowledge is always linked to the people that make it (Rose, 1997). Researchers therefore have to be reflexive and acknowledge their own experiences of what they are studying (Deutsch, 2004). This provides a critique against a conceptualisation of the all-knowing, all-seeing objective researcher or what Haraway has referred to as the ‘god-trick’ (cited in Fine, 1998: 138). The findings of this research, then, represent just one reading of data collected by me. Thus, as Holt (2004: 17) states, ‘the researcher is not an expert’

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but a ‘supplicant’ who wishes to learn as much as possible from the people he or she speaks with and tries to represent these voices as faithfully as possible.

Note 1. The term ‘different-sex’ is preferred over ‘opposite-sex’ and ‘boy-girl twins’. Whilst the notion of ‘opposite-sex twins’ seems to reinforce assumptions of gender duality, the notion of ‘boy-girl twins’ implies that each of these twins embody both sexes (thereby reinforcing notions that twins constitute one person or one unit).

Appendix B: Twins Who Participated in the Study Without Other Family Members Sally and Rachel were non-identical adult twins, aged 20, who were each studying at different universities. Their parents and two older sisters, Carrie aged 24 and Mo aged 22, did not take part in the study. Ian and Peter were unsure about their zygosity (whether they were identical or non-identical), but thought they were likely to be identical. Like Emma and Ruth, these twins also looked very alike. They lived with their mother and had two older sisters, Karen and Mary, who lived locally. Only Ian and Peter took part in the study. Justin was a non-identical adult twin, aged 22. He and his twin brother (Dominic) were the only children in the family. Justin was the only member of this family to take part in the research. Jennifer, aged 36, was a non-identical twin. She had a twin brother, Thomas, a sister, Katie (who was 13 months younger), an adopted brother, Mark (who was four years younger) and a half-sister, Lisa (aged 18). She also had two step-siblings, John and Andrea. Jennifer was the only member of the family to take part in the study. She also filled out the open-ended questionnaire instead of being interviewed.

203

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Index adolescence 23, 25 identity development 36 adult-child boundary 57 adulthood 23, 24 changing perceptions of 26 advertising, use of twins in 33–4 agency 14–16, 52, 92, 190–1 ages and stages 10, 56, 74 Alanen, Leena 52 arguments 139–42 Ariès, Philippe 11 Australian Multiple Births Association 3 authoritative voices 183–4 autonomy 24, 49, 63, 127–8

presentation of sameness through 95–6 as projects 93–4 taste in clothes 108–11 bodily density 100 body idioms 92 body projects 195 body-work 92 boundary 121 bounded individual 21 bounded space 124 boyfriends 128–9 Britain’s Conjoined Twins: Faith and Hope 40 Bulger, Jamie, murder of 26, 50

babyhood 68 bedroom space 73–7, 119–20 different-sex twins 76 and identity 120–1 mapping identity in 121–3 separate rooms 75–6, 123–5 shared rooms 73–5, 129–39 beds, as symbols of separateness 133–4 being apart 145 naming 154–5 school 154–5 social value of 152–3 see also separation being together 145 naming 153 school 151–3 shared rooms 73–5, 129–39 best friendship 175–7, 186 Bijani, Laden and Laleh 39–40 Blyton, Enid, Twins at St Clare’s 32, 34 bodies 91–118 identity through 91–5, 117–18 limits of physicality 113–17 narration of difference 104–6 physical resemblances 107–8 physicality of 94–5

character differences 62 Child Safety Orders 29 child-adult distinction 28–9 childhood 197–8 different experiences of 25–6 discourses of 20–5 innocence of 22 institutionalisation of 53 social construction 10–12, 190–1 social incompetence of 22 children growing up 25, 55–6, 63 integration into society 23 rights of 27 citizenship 27 classes 77–83 separate 79–80, 82 staying together 77–9 closeness 41–6, 64–5, 175–7 different-sex twins 178 same-sex twins 41–2, 178 clothes exchanging 102–4 taste in 108–11 see also dress co-construction 183–4

216

Index Cohen, Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community 121, 168 comfort 149–50 communication 163 psychic connectedness 174 twin language 41, 162 companionship 149–50 comparing 42–3, 168–71 conflicts 139–42 conjoined twins 39–40, 47 desirability of separation 40 relationships with others 45 stigmatisation of 47 connectedness 42 constraints 193–6 continuum of siblingship 46–8, 106, 138, 173 contrasting 168–71 importance of 165–7 conversation analysis 163 cryptophasia 41 cultural beliefs 4–6 birthright 4 double paternity 4 positive viewpoints 5 sacred status of twins 5 sinfulness of twins 4–5 twins as special honour 5 curfews 29 decision-making 66–87 developmental psychology 22 DeVilliers, Julia, Teen Girlfriends 103 differences 163–5 embodied sense of 104–6 instigators and followers 101 personality in portrayal of 105–6, 116–17 significance for older children 96–8 through dress 100–1 see also separation different-sex twins 34, 145–7 assertion of twin identity 114 borrowing clothes 103–4 closeness between 178 separate rooms 76–7 space utilisation by 145–6 discourses 19–20

217

of childhood 20–5 discreditable persons 93 discredited people 93 display 120 dress 67–73 ‘cuteness’ factor 70–1 difference through 100–1 exchanging clothes 102–4 as expression of twin identity 93 identical 67, 69–70, 96 individuality of 97 school uniforms 115–16 style of 2 taste in clothes 108–11 dual paternity belief 4 duality of structure 14 Dying to be Apart 39–40 Elias, Norbert 21 embodied connectedness 179–81 embodied difference 96 environment 6–8 bedroom space 73–7, 119–20 family 51–2 ethnography of communication 163 exoticising of twinship 174–8 face-work 92 family environment 51–2 family life 26 family narratives 170 family as private space 57–8 family resemblances 60–1 female friendships 177–8 figurative thought 49 Fisher, Jane, Cherry Twins 34, 37 followers 101, 147–8 Fordism 49 Foster, John, Who’s Who 32 fraternal twins see non-identical (dizygotic) twins friendships 152 best friendship 175–7, 186 between twins 41–6, 64–5, 175–7 boyfriends 128–9 female 177–8 girlfriends 128–9 male 177–8 school 155–7

218

Index

gender differences 68–9 and twin identity 114 generation 52 girlfriends 128–9 Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 91–4 growing up 11, 25, 27, 55–6, 63 moving out 125–6

importance of 99 problems of school uniforms 115–16 individuation 7, 21, 38 instigators 101, 147–8 institutionalisation 29 interchangeability 115 interdependence of twins 64–5

habitus 15, 51, 187–8 Hall, G. Stanley 23–4 Hargreaves, Roger, Little Miss Twins 32 Harmer, David, Which One Are You? 33 heredity 6–8 home moving back 126–7 moving out 125–6 as safe haven 143 homophobia 178 Hope, Laura Lee, The Bobbsey Twins in the Country 43

jealousy

identical (monozygotic) twins 6, 26–7 closeness of 41–2 identicalness dress 67, 69–70 social value of 71–2 identity 1, 12–13, 36 flexibility of 12 gendered 69 as inner core 21 mapping of 121–3 scripts 20 search for 24 spatialisation of see space suspending performance 184–5 talk as performance of 188–9 through body 91–5 identity work 120 incest, fears of 76, 128, 178 independence 22, 24, 38, 49, 63 individuality 2, 12, 21, 30, 60, 172–4 bounded individual 21 concealment of 85 in dress 97

42

killing of twins 4 knowledge 19–20 language development 161 twin language 41, 162 Lareau, Annette 58 late modernity 25–30 Lawler, Stephanie, Mothering the Self 61 life course 9–10 linguistic habitus 187–8 male friendships 177–8 Mary-Kate and Ashley P.S. Wish You Were Here 43 Two of a Kind 34 Mayall, Berry 52 mental growth 22 mission statements 51, 59–66 Mitchell, Claudia 120 mothers as carers 53, 55 decision-making by 68 moving back home 126–7 moving out 125–6 myths and legends 4 naming 83–7 being apart 154–5 being together 153 confusion between twins 85–6 pairing of names 86 rhyming/similar sounding names 85–6 as ‘twins’ 84–5 Neasi, Barbara, Just Like Me 34 New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC) 11, 119, 162

Index non-identical (dizygotic) twins 1–2, 6, 47 naming 84–5 physical difference 62 normalisation strategies 171 older children public announcement of twinship 111 separate bedrooms 75–6 separate classes 79–80, 82 significance of difference 96–8 operative intelligence 49 opportunities 193–6 opposites 34–5 outside world, dangers of 29, 143–5 over-reliance 66 Palmer, Sue, Toxic Childhood 29 parent-child interactions 161 parent-child relations 51–88, 194 conceptualisation of 52–4 structuring context 87–8 Parenting Orders 29 parenting practices 66–87 bedrooms 73–7 classes 77–83 dress 67–73 naming 83–7 parenting roles 55–9 parents of twins 54–9 mission statements 59–66 specialness of 70–1 personal property, protection of 135–6 personality 62, 172 and portrayal of difference 105–6, 116–17 personhood 21 physical difference 62, 104 and individuality 69 physical resemblance 107–8 physical space 35–6 physicality, limits of 113–17 Piaget, Jean 22 Post-Fordism 49 power 19–20

219

privacy 127–8 physical 141 separate rooms 75–6, 123–5 private world of twins 41 protectionism 174–5 Prout, Alan, The Future of Childhood 25 psy complex 27 psychic connectedness 174 psychoanalysis 7 re-partnering 129 Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline 120 rivalry between twins 4 romantic relationships 44–5 Russell, Willy, Blood Brothers 43 sacredness of twins 5 Salinger, Adrienne, In My Room 121 same-sex twins 6, 26–7 closeness of 41–2, 178 sameness 31–7 presentation through bodies 95–6 school 38, 150–7 being apart 154–5 being together 151–3 classes 77–83 friendships 152, 155–7 space at 150–1 timetables 82 uniforms and individuality 115–16 scripts 20 self 13 as part of twin dyad 181–2 self-reliance 21 sense of place 123 separate rooms 75–6, 123–5 as container for ‘self’ 124 separation 39 beds as symbols of 133–4 benefits of 83 conjoined twins 40 dress 97 schooling 79–80, 82 social pressure for 146 shared objects 134–5 shared rooms 73–5, 129–39 beds 133–4 naming and claiming sides 131–2

220

Index

shared rooms – continued objects within 134–5 opportunities and limitations 129–31 protecting personal property 135–6 unstable boundaries 136–9 shifting selves 178–9 sibling alliances 169 sibling rivalry 42 siblings and bedroom space 74 loneliness of 137–9 role of 58 siblingship 13–14, 39, 46–8, 46 similarities 163–5 social capital of twins 71–3, 193 social class 58–9 social construction of childhood 10–12, 190–1 of twinship 10–12, 190–1 social identity 12–14 social interaction 70, 92 social interest in twins 3–6 social relations, shaping by space 74 socialisation and individuality 60 top-down model 52 sociality 45 space 119–60 bedroom space 73–7, 119–20 and identity 120–1, 159–60 mapping identity in 121–3 separate rooms 75–6, 123–5 shared rooms 73–5, 129–39 bounded 124 and identity 120–1, 159–60 naming and claiming 131–2 school 150–7 separate classes 79–80, 82 and social relations 74 for twinship 142–5 Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) 27 stereotypes 20, 47–8, 191 Stewart, Elizabeth 8 sticking together 150 stigma 93 twinship as source of 98–9

stranger danger 29, 143 Strathern, Marilyn 61 structure 14–16, 52 duality of 14 superfecundation 47 talk 161–89 authoritative voices and co-construction 183–4 comparing and contrasting 168–71 importance of contrast 165–7 individuality and twinship 172–4 linguistic habitus 187–8 normalisation strategies 171 performance of identity 188–9 self as part of twin dyad 181–2 shifting selves 178–9 similarities and differences 163–5 specific to twins 185–6 twin language 41, 162 we-self 179–81 The Dark Mirror 35 The Parent Trap 32, 37 togetherness 37–40 twin experience 196–7 twin language 41, 162 twin mystique 41 twin sameness 168 twin studies 6–8 twin talk 185–6 twin-to-twin interaction 161 Twins 34 twins as cohesive unit 2 social interest in 3–6 twins clubs 3 Twins and Multiple Births Association (TAMBA) 3, 38 Twinsburg Festival 3, 32 twinship being a child 48 definition of 30–1 exoticising of 174–8 holding on to 111–13, 158–9 identification with childhood 85 notions of 60 performance of 191–3 as social capital 71–3

Index social construction 10–12, 190–1 as source of stigma 98–9 space for 142–5 uniforms 115–16 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 27 Declaration on Human Cloning 30

221

unstable boundaries 136–9 upbringing 6–8 Wallace, Marjorie, The Silent Twins 43 we-self 179–81 Wilson, Jacqueline, Double Act 32, 37 zones

132