Conjoined Twins In Geek Love Essay

“I almost had a boyfriend, once. Elly would have let me. She thought it was O.K She shut down whenever I talked to him. Whenever he came around, shed cut her voltage way back and stayed quiet. She wanted me to go ahead and love” (Dunn 280). This is just part of the entangled life of conjoined twins Katherine Dunn describes in her novel Geek Love. Conjoined twins live every second of their lives as one, which immediately raises question about not just intimacy, but more centrally identity and personhood. Most importantly for thought for the life of conjoined twins is the argument around separation. Current science and mainstream thinking categorizes conjoined twins as their own individuals, because primarily their separate cognitive abilities,

According to a study about conjoined twins, “they develop distinct personalities and express different levels of behavior and intelligence” (Singhal 146). This illustrates the twins’ differentiation and ability to demonstrate a sense of identity even though they are conjoined. Another experiment showed, “that sometimes one half of the brain is oblivious to the activities going on in the other half” (source). Conjoined twins can be separate minds, separate consciousnesses, and separate identities, yet still are conjoined in one body. These facts may refute the fact that conjoined twins cannot live separate lives in a conjoined body. Even something as personal as intimacy seen in Dunn’s Geek Love can be separated out. A study explored Dunn’s concept- “When asked about being tied to a twin during lovemaking, conjoined twins usually answer that they learn how ‘‘not to be there…Being conjoined twins is a unique experience indeed” (Mannix). As with many other disabilities, as “Alice Dreger, a medical historian whose goal is justice for conjoined twins, says, ‘Most people who are conjoined, given the opportunity to do so, accept and embrace a life of two minds in one packaging of skin” (Dreger 43). Dreger continues, “Conjoinment becomes so essential to these twins—to their sense of who they are—that they cannot readily conceive of living in a different mode” (Dreger 47). This reality is so much true, that “ong-living conjoined twins, when faced with death, refused the option of separation” (Singhal 146). Conjoined twins exist as independent people even if they share one body despite what the populace