Identical Twins

The Social Construction and Performance of Identity in Culture and Society

Mvikeli Ncube

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351136129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Identical Twins: The Social Construction and Performance of Identity in Culture and Society, Ncube conceptualises twin identity as a multi-layered dynamic that changes through performance, and explores twin identity through a social constructionist approach.

Until now, mainstream twin studies have mostly sought to explain social phenomena about twins from 'inside' the person, providing their explanations in terms of internal entities such as personality structures with an obvious underlying essentialist assumption. By examining the theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Ncube shows that the 'identity' of twins is managed in both an academic and cultural context, and in relation to specific audiences.

Relocating the explanations that we gather in social research, including in qualitative research in psychology, the book focuses its enquiry on the social practices and interactions that people engage in with each other, not delving 'inside' the person. Using real-world twin accounts, the book maps out the social construction of twin identity, and allows for the twins' own voices to be examined in relation to twin experiences.

Also addressing aspects of being misunderstood, as well as the idea of misunderstanding oneself, this is fascinating reading for students and researchers in critical and cultural psychology, and anyone interested in twin studies.

1

Cultural representations of twins

This chapter looks at cultural representations of twins because these are connected to the social context within which the social construction of twin identity takes place. The chapter does not treat identities as always existing and producing culture, but culture and social context are treated as changing over time and creating identities. Also, as culture changes over time so too does the experience of being a twin. This point addresses not only the question of why I focus on cultural representations of twins, it also sheds light on why the book goes on to address twin representations through interviews with such people. These interviews are not simply about experience, but about experience as represented and constructed in language. For, as Scott (1991) suggests, in order to understand the repressive mechanisms that shape the experiences of particular social groups, we need to consider the historical and cultural processes that, through language and discourse, help to socially construct those experiences. In the chapter that follows, I start this process by examining the cultural matrix of twin representations within which twins live and build their own representations of themselves and their worlds.

This chapter looks at representations of identical twins in Western society and the way in which their identity is accounted for. In this chapter, I particularly focus on films and books, as they are a rich source of twin representations in Western culture. This chapter, among other things, offers a socio-cultural review of the Western context for those interested in conducting research on twin identity or accounts of twins’ lives. This chapter aims to highlight how identical twins are represented in Western popular culture and to critically discuss the implications and significance of such representations of identical twins and of Western society at large. I argue that the representation of twins in popular culture misrepresents them and I question why twins’ own voices are missing in those representations.

This chapter seeks to review themes that emerge from a broad range of cultural texts, such as one play and films and books. I draw on thematic analysis, as described by Braun and Clarke (2006), to identify and review the patterns of data. I want to provide a rich thematic review of twin representations so that the reader can gain a clear sense of predominant twin themes in Western popular culture. The review in this chapter does not go beyond what is written in the texts. It focuses solely on how identical twins are represented in the films, books and play. I then critically discuss the significance, implications and meanings of those representations of identical twins and Western society at large in light of other studies too.

Culture, according to Griffin (2000, p. 17), can be seen ‘as traditional and communicated meanings and practices [focusing] on how these meanings and practices are lived individually, how they affect identities and subjectivities’. This chapter briefly outlines the concept of representation and presents some theory of visual and written fictional and cultural representation. I briefly explore both cultural and social representations, as these overlap and affect each other, including through their social effects. I then focus on the representations of identical twins in three different kinds of text (Western films and books and one play), before drawing conclusions about the possible implications of these representations on our understanding of identical twins within Western society. I acknowledge, too, that the cultural representations I focus on are not limited to identical twins but can also be seen as relevant to other close sibling relationships, such as those between brothers and sisters and heterozygotic (non-identical) twins. However, I find that these cultural representations are more prominent and frequent in relation to identical twins. It is also important to note that cultural representations are not the only factors that affect how people understand or react to identical twins; other factors play a role too, such as economic and micro-social factors.

Before I move on to my review, I should make it clear that the Western narratives of twins draw from a common, specific culture. Amongst other examples, African cultural images of twins are very different to those in the West. Although my interviewees did include pairs of twins who were born in non-Western cultures, all interviews were conducted in the UK and all the twins drew from Western culture. This book is therefore predominantly rooted in Western understandings of twins, and concentrates in this chapter on Western popular cultural representations.

‘Representation’ was defined by Ussher et al. (2000, p. 87) as ‘one of the many social processes by which specific orders are ceaselessly constructed, modified, resisted and reinstated … they articulate and produce meanings as well as represent a world already meaningful’. Stuart Hall (1997, p. 16) postulated that ‘representation’ refers to ‘the production of the meaning of the concepts and language which enables us to refer to either the “real” world of objects, people or events or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events’. In this account, representation is concerned with the production of meaning through language. According to Hall, without different forms of representation it would be impossible to make meaning of the world we live in. This argument is based on the assertion that meaning depends on the systems of ideas, concepts and images which are then used to stand for or represent the world. The images and concepts give us the ability to refer to things both inside and outside our minds. Representation involves organising, grouping and categorising many concepts and establishing complicated relationships between them. These relationships between things in the real world, real or fictional, as well as events, objects, people and conceptual systems, serve as the mental representations upon which meaning depends (Hall, 1997).

The place of fiction in representation

Gottschall (2012) argues that a message expressed through a fictional account may be more readily received and may meet with less criticism than a non-fictional message that may be based on facts designed to persuade people. He argued that when a message is delivered via a non-fictional vehicle, full of facts, people read it with their intellectual ‘shields’ up. Yet, if a message is presented in fictional form, people may become so absorbed in the story that they drop their guard, allowing themselves to be emotionally moved and unconsciously influenced. However, Hall (1997, p. 340) asserts that the word ‘fiction’ suggests separation from real life, leading potentially to a ‘dismissal of fiction as harmless entertainment, or worse, time wasting money-spinners driven by the profit driven entertainment industry’. He argues that a circularity exists between what we read in books and watch in films and what occurs in public discourse.

Furthermore, Hall points out that different genres apply to written and visual fiction, emphasising particular representations from different angles, such as comedy, horror, thriller, documentary, soap opera, romance and sitcom. Representations of twins in films and books paint and emphasise particular pictures of them according to genre. This point is important because it makes it possible to analyse cultural representations of identical twins from the perspective of various genres. The different genres employed in written and visual fiction are of great significance to this book, because society and twins themselves draw from these portrayals to a certain degree and form their understanding of identical twins on such a basis. Discourses on identical twins that circulate in society are likely to impact on how identical twins themselves perform their identity, since identity is affected by culture, and some discourses have their origin in visual and written fiction.

According to Rushdie (1992), films and novels have been widely used across different cultures as vehicles to discuss perceptions of the world. Fleishman (1992) makes the point that fictional events we may read about or watch in films take their meaning not in a vacuum but from real communities; they are constructions, created through the use of language and visual symbols, under the influence of specific cultural histories and the present. For instance, fictional characters in films and literature are sometimes drawn in relation to history, cultures and real people, alive or dead, so they may relate to actual experiences too (Chatman, 1990).

Lothe (2000) notes that different story types derive from different cultures and these take various forms within each cultural framework, ranging from myth to song. Chatman (1990) makes the point that films and novels often offer a commentary on real-life issues. Furthermore, according to Lothe (2000), in fiction, be it in the form of film or written literature, we see a reflection of what people have experienced, how people have been formed by these experiences and what has happened in the past. Lothe (p. 8) still notes, though, that ‘the relationship between narrative prose literature and narrative film … confirms the point that those narratives which are part of the world around us assume different forms and are expressed in many ways’.

It is crucial to note that identical twins are used in books and films as metaphors for a number of different things, which writers of fiction and creators of films want to put across; at times, these are not really about the experiences of identical twins but are representations of what film and novel writers think about identical twins or indeed about other issues.

Hall (1997, p. 83) argues that a documentary film ‘is mediated through the perspective of the person making it’; for instance, a person’s culture may be a mediating factor. The representations I focus on here are predominantly fictional portrayals of identical twins in films and literature, which may relate, to a certain degree, to the actual experiences of identical twins as well as to the conventions of representation – of fiction in its various guises – and, as Hall suggests, to the perspectives of the makers of the texts.

Cultural and social representations

According to Moscovici (2001), research shows that social representations connect an individual with their society and people make use of them to understand everyday life. They also serve the purpose of facilitating the interaction between members of society, by giving meaning and sense to their world. By definition, social representations are

a set of concepts, statements and explanations originating in daily life in the course of inter-individual communications. They are the equivalent in our society to myth and belief systems in traditional societies: they might even be said to be contemporary versions of common sense.

ibid., p. 18

Discourse is said to be the backbone of social representation (Potter and Billig, 1992). It is further asserted that the process of telling stories (narratives) allows room for social representations to be created. What is or can be told in a narrative is influenced by the context in which it is told; but both the context and the story are not independent of wider social representations. Furthermore, it is assumed that people will always check their position in terms of the boundaries of their cultural standards, to make sure that whatever they tell in their narratives conforms to them (Murray, 2002). These standards have a tendency to be socially dynamic because they are created and recreated over and over again, as social interaction continues in everyday life.

Social representations may start as an individual representation that is carried over to one other individual or individuals through dialogue. As social interaction with other members of society continues, the next individual may complement that initial representation and may echo it to others, thereby spreading it and gradually helping to make it established (Moscovici, 2001). In this way, members of a society create social representations in order to eventually establish a common ground in terms of understanding their world and the objects around them. Established social representations tend to regulate or influence, in different ways, how members of a society conduct themselves. These representations impose themselves on people in subtle ways, so that, without necessarily being conscious of them, they find themselves conforming to them. As a result, social representations are something more than products of human creation. Acting upon a given society, they are also prescriptive and compelling in nature as they spell out how to do what (Murray, 2002).

Echoing these views, Voelklein and Howarth (2005) assert that social representations are used to create a common culture for a society and for different social groups, informing their identity and marking behavioural boundaries. Their creation and validation are collective acts on the part of members of a society, through social interaction and communication; hence, social representations cannot be accredited to any one individual. They are not independent of the cultural context in which they exist nor of existing social practices and their history in a society. Moscovici (2001) suggests that we should be careful to avoid the mistake of assuming that social representations are uniform and that they are shared by everyone in a society. They should be understood just as general tools used by people in a given society to create their world. Thus, social representations serve to outline an order through which individuals in a society orient themselves in their social world. They further perform the role of facilitating communication among community members by making a code available for naming different aspects of and objects in their world. This social code is further used as a social exchange tool for classifying and naming not only their world but their history, from an individual to a community level. Narratives, in this way, are closely linked with social representations, because it is in the course of telling narratives that social representations emerge (Murray, 2002).

Themes from films and books

I have examined a broad sample of films and books and one play from the early sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century, thus over a period of time during which identical twins have consistently been used as main characters or major themes. The sample has deliberately included a very old play to demonstrate the continuity of some very old representations. The films and books and the play considered in this chapter fall within the following genres: thriller, horror, comedy, crime, erotica, romance, political and mystery.

I review the following films: Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, 1988); Deadly Sibling Rivalry (Culpepper, 2011); Basket Case (Henenlotter, 1982); Basket Case 2 (Henenlotter, 1990); Lies of the Twins (Hunter, 1991); The Parent Trap (Swift, 1961); and, finally, The Comedy of Errors (Branagh, 2013). I also review the television series, Sister, Sister (Bass, Gilbert and Shafferman, 1994–1999).

I review the following books: On the Black Hill (Chatwin, 1996); Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Coppel, 1967); Gemini (Tournier, [1975] 1981); The Solid Mandala (White, 1966); and The Kray Brothers: The Image Shattered (Cabell, 2002).

As well as these films and books, I also review Shakespeare’s play, The Comedy of Errors. Shakespeare’s text is the oldest source in this book, after the Old Testament of the Bible, and I have included it here for three reasons. First, because William Shakespeare has played such an influential role in the development of Western literature; second, as an example of some common themes, which are clearly shown as the play features two sets of identical twins; third, this and other plays by Shakespeare are still performed in theatres today, which makes them current and relevant because of their continuing role in Western culture.

I have specifically chosen these films, books and one play to use as vehicles to explore the theme of twins because of their clarity of delivery and the prominence they afford this theme. I focus specifically on twin themes in films, books and one play rather than in poetry or short stories, for example, because I want to review evident and clear narratives.

The other reason for choosing films, books and one play is that, unlike television programmes and photographs, which are also probably not as rich and extensive in terms of cultural currency, films, books and plays are culturally long-lived. Visual fine art may be long-lived, but it currently lacks cultural reach. Bordwell and Thompson (1997) also argue that novels, plays and films carry a valuable narrative dimension as they feature the most important elements of a narrative: time, space, plot, cause and effect. Looking at the films, books and play cited above, I noticed that the following themes seem to also feature prominently in Western culture: identity confusion; failure to separate; jealousy and possessiveness; intimacy and sameness; rivalry; and complementary halves.

In this book, I do not claim to carry out a systematic analysis of films, plays and books. Rather, I seek to show broadly how identical twins are represented in Western culture. Review of these fictional representations (excluding the factual account of the Kray twins by Craig Cabell) will, alongside my work on social representations, also adopt ideas from the work of Braun and Clarke (2006), particularly on identifying and reviewing patterns of data; this constitutes, however, an indicative heuristic rather than a full thematic analysis. The films, books and play are important because popular culture can potentially validate or invalidate particular representations about identical twins. The validated and invalidated representations may have different effects on identical twins, as some may draw from these to understand themselves. Besides, the ways in which identical twins are represented in films, plays and novels appear to ignore some of their experiences; this will also be seen in some of the films, books and the play that I cite. I now focus on some of the themes found in these texts.

Identity confusion

A tendency to impose certain values and identities, including a misrepresentation of identical twins in films and novels, can be clearly demonstrated in the theme of ‘identity confusion’ that often appears in the material I analyse. Fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Cultural representations of twins
• 2 Traditional psychological research on twins
• 3 Being misunderstood
• 4 Twin identity
• 5 Couples
• 6 Twins, culture and psychology
• References
• Index