Discordance, duplicity, and desire: conjoined twins in Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake

ABSTRACT

This article examines the characterisation of conjoined twins Hindrance and Perfidia within the fantastic story world of Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake. These comics expand roles and make room for twinned characters on terms differentiated from the constraints of past visual depictions of conjoined twins. The fanciful nature of this female-centric world normalises the twins’ anomalous bodies, thus allowing them to explore emotions and actions typically deemed off limits. Furthermore, connections are made between Hindrance and Perfidia and actual conjoined twins to indicate when Darcy’s representations speak back to ‘freak’ histories. Ultimately, via expressions of anger and sexuality and constructions of alternative female communities for both normative-bodied people and their conjoined brethren, the twins of Meat Cake enjoy a fluidity of identity rarely allowed in visual treatments of ‘freaked’ and Othered bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• Conjoined twins
• Siamese twins
• disability
• sideshow
• anger

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For an in-depth look at representations of all twins, see de Nooy (2005).

2. Reporting reliable information about Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst is complicated, as some argue the twins never existed except as town fable. For more information on them, see Jan Bondeson’s article ‘The Biddenden Maids: A Curious Chapter in the History of Conjoined Twins’ in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (1992) or Bondeson’s book The Two-Headed Boy, and Other Medical Marvels (2000).

3. ‘Old Timer’s Disease’ (Darcy 2016, 307-309) makes a joke of Effluvia’s many men. When Hindrance and Perfidia approach her on a beach, Effluvia introduces them to the man she is kissing. He says, ‘Nice to meet your acquaintance. We’re monogamous’, to which the twins reply, ‘Weird’ (308).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Santha Kerns

Susan Santha Kerns is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Chicago Feminist Film Festival. She produced the documentary Manlife and wrote the screenplay for Little Red, which won Best Feature awards at the Berlin Independent, Canada International, Great Lakes, and Driftless film festivals. She also has produced or directed numerous award-winning short films. Her work on conjoined twins can be found in Nip/Tuck: Television that Gets Under Your Skin and the journal Comunicazioni Sociali. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.