Book Description

This book draws on nearly one thousand cases and anecdotes about twins bending and breaking rules in order to fulfill or flout tenets of twinhood. Society’s unwillingness to contextualize mores and policies to suit twins may perpetuate controversy and law-breaking. Twins and Deviance shows how twins’ allegedly sacred bond violates conventions beginning at conception. Throughout their lives, they may be victimized, tortured, and neglected specifically because of their bond. Twins have lives that matter – their bond is not static or unconditional, it may be fluent and emotional. The book paints a picture of twin individuals whose lives relate to contemporary readers’ and audiences’ lives because they are weird, eccentric, ritualized, fetishized, pornographized, criminalized, and chastised by society; but what is especially interesting about twins is that society has institutionalized controversial practices and traditions sometimes implicitly or explicitly demanding that twinhood be realized or dishonored so that twins comply with social norms and expectations. Offering a truculent, unpretentious, and straightforward representation of contemporary society, Twins and Deviance does not defend or defy society’s strange, niche, and shaded view of twins. Rather, it artfully and sensitively depicts twins as historically and presently seeming like gods, heroes, renegades, saviors, mutations, terrorists, gangs, and betrayers; and skillfully discusses twins’ bodies to elucidate their individuality, decode their correspondence, and explore analytical tributaries new to sociocultural research. Using vivid examples, Twins and Deviance postulates that twins intrigue and entrance singletons because they deviate from norms, embody principles of duality, fulfill self-reflexive fantasies, and symbolize eternal life and the afterlife. The value of twins and twinhood to singletons is evident in psychoanalysis, reflections, religion and mythology, words, and politics; and yet, this is the only book to bring to light the immense depth of this captivating insight. Twins and Deviance challenges and improves previous research by collecting new topics to retool twins and deviance discussions. As such, it is a must-read for students, professors, and audiences engaging in gender, justice, sexuality, legal, and cultural studies, and all researchers conducting twin studies.