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Conjoined twins have simultaneously been feared and vilified, whilst also idealised and fetishised by non-disabled authors and audiences. This split
reaction is partially explained by the challenges that conjoinment is perceived to present to key Enlightenment concepts and resulting constructions of selfhood.
This thesis collects such (mis)representations 1830-present and contextualises them amidst the social concerns of these periods. It takes a broad definition of texts, analysing fictional and historical accounts of conjoinment, promotional material, medical reports, and legal transcripts. It brings together multiple critical
perspectives from intersectional disability studies to analyse these non-disabled responses to conjoinment. It understands these portrayals and real-world engagements as vehicles for projected non-disabled fantasies, twinned with a threatened sense of self and porous bodily boundaries. It interrogates the core of such depictions, showing these portrayals as nested within cumulative layers of anxieties related to the aforementioned ideas.
Chapter one explores the developing idea of a ‘normal’ body 1830-80, arguing that depictions of conjoinment from this period were motivated by a
desire to ontologically distinguish ‘normal’ audiences from not-‘normal’ performers. It contextualises this with the rise and decline of the American freak
show, and the development of evolutionary and embryological paradigms. Chapter two then examines 1860-1930 to show this imagery as informed by
concerns related to ‘privacy’ – stimulated by the development of the camera and the close 1884 American election. These depictions shifted emphasis from demarcating between conjoined twins and non-disabled people, to managing and controlling the space between conjoined twins. In chapter three these concerns are related to the idea of the ‘individual’ within the context of 1890-
1960. Here, there is a pronounced fear of the intersubjectivity of conjoinment whilst America underwent a crisis of ‘wholeness’ in respect to masculinity. The final chapter, then, shows how conjoined imagery 1970-present extended the
normalisation strategies used to resist the feared ‘porosity’ of conjoinment, and instead presented conjoined twins as two demarcated ‘individuals’ connected only superficially. This became used to resist the advances of the social model of disability which imbued people with impairments with greater agency, and thus eroded the psychological defences outlined so far. This imposed ontology thus became presented as self-defeating agency with each twin continuously getting in each other’s way.
Overall, I argue that these intertwining concepts have consistently been seen to be incompatible with conjoinment and to also reflect back upon the observing singletons. Crucially, I show that conjoined twins are consistently presented as the ultimate expression of the inverse of these four foundational
concepts, as rather than confront their own fallibilities, singletons instead project them into conjoined characters. Through a complex web of repression,
exposure, and projection, I show how conjoined public figures and protagonists have been used to articulate these associated underlying social concerns. In doing so, I extend Fiona Campbell’s general identification of non-disabled understandings of disability: applying the ideas of “negative ontologies” and “unthought identities” specifically to conjoinment. In doing so I hope to offer a
new space for conjoined identity to be reclaimed. |
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