Contested Subjects: The Configuration of Conjoined Twins in Contemporary World Literature and Screen Media

Abstract

How might contemporary narratives regarding conjoined twinning, a form of bodily difference which disrupts taken for granted notions of “biological” individuality, trouble normative discourses of corporeality, individuality, selfhood, and the human? This thesis traces the configuration of conjoined twins in contemporary literature and screen media. Drawing together insights from critical disability studies, postcolonial studies, Foucauldian scholarship and Science and Technology Studies, it attends to the variety of ways in which contemporary texts from different contexts have engaged with and reimagined historical modes of configuring conjoined twins, such as those that took shape in the context of the freak show, as well as nineteenth-century teratological and ethnographic discourses. It pays particular attention to contemporary postcolonial and diasporic writers who have mobilised conjoined twins as figures to explore tensions and ambivalences surrounding notions of a common identity, for example based on nationalism, ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, or religion. Chapter one provides a historical case study of nineteenth-century, black, enslaved conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy. Through the analysis of freak show pamphlets, newspaper advertisements and medical case histories, the chapter contends that the various configurations of Millie and Christine’s bodies and subjectivities that circulated during the period were underpinned by different ontological claims connected to broader socio-political power structures, notably those regarding sex, gender, race and individuality. Chapter two explores the configuration of conjoined twins in televised medical documentary series such as the National Geographic Channel’s Extraordinary Humans (2009) and Channel 5’s Extraordinary People (2010). Building on scholarship from critical disability studies, post-development theory and television studies, the chapter analyses the interaction between medical and development discourses in the documentaries. Chapter three attends to the various ways in which post-independence Indian-English novels such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Sunita Lad Bhamray’s Ganga Jamuna have deployed the figure of the conjoined twin to contest and complicate ideals of individual, autonomous selfhood which subtend the genre of the Western Bildungsroman. Chapter four reflects on the configuration of conjoinment in marvellous realist novels such as Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone. The chapter argues that the marvellous realist novels under consideration mobilise conjoinment to reflect on the multiplicity of modern diasporic subjectivities.