Focus on the body

One body, one self. One human. For most of us this is natural. However for a conjoined twin the question of how to define one’s self takes on an entirely new meaning.

A conjoined twin shares part of their body with someone else, and the question of how to define one’s self takes on a whole new meaning. No surprise then that a researcher of theories of the body is interested in conjoined twins.

margrit shildrick

She calls herself a body philosopher and her research focuses on that which is abnormal. As she says, by studying the abnormal we can discover what we consider to be normal. Margrit Shildrick is a newly appointed professor at the Division of Gender Studies.

“Most of us take it for granted that we are born and die in the same body, and that we live our lives in separate, individual bodies. Autonomy is a highly valued property. But it isn’t natural at all.

Present advanced surgery allows as a matter of routine the separation of conjoined twins when they are children. Society, “all of us”, takes for granted that that’s what they want. Is that true? What do we know about how they experience their identity? They are born into one body that, at least partly, is also inhabited by another individual. What does that do to their self-image?

Are they one or two subjects? What happens when they are separated; does that really make their lives better?” Shildrick asks.

Throughout history there are many examples of conjoined twins who have lived full lives while conjoined. They have married and had children, grown old and died together. Twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel, born on 8 March 1990, are one modern example. Their parents turned down surgery that would have separated them. Today they are 22 years old.

“And they seem to be happy literally living together,” says Shildrick.

She gives another example of how strictly we view what is normal when it comes to our bodies.

“Children who are born with six fingers on one hand have the sixth one removed surgically, and this is done at a very early age. It is seen as completely natural to have five fingers on each hand. But why is it so important?

Traditionally philosophers haven’t devoted their attention to the body,” she continues.

“Quite the opposite; the soul, spirit, and intellect have been the focus for (male-dominated) philosophy research. They have been considered completely separate from the body. The corporeal has been described as something limiting, inferior, even dirty and often associated with women.

“Not just philosophers, but also social scientists, like sociologists, have studied people in their social contexts, in groups and nations, but have completely ignored their bodies.

It is only feminist research that changed this. Interest in women’s reproductive health put the focus on the body.

Margrit Shildrick’s own thesis is titled “Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics”. Today she works with what she calls critical disability research in gender research.

Shildrick was born in Ireland and has studied and conducted research there, as well as in England and Canada. She is part of a large Canadian research project addressing heart transplant recipients. In videotaped conversations they talk about their lives after the operation. The study comprises 27 people who have lived for at least a year with their new heart.

The most striking result was that 80% of the recipients felt tormented and sad after the operation. They were unsure of who they were, who they had become. They didn’t recognise themselves and their own bodies, and it upset them that their heart had a different history. But they also knew that they should be grateful, that the operation had saved their life.

“However some even went so far as to say that they wish they hadn’t had the transplant, even though they knew that they would have died,” Shildrick says.

“Bear in mind that people who took part in this study were mentally stable, those who were selected for research ethics reasons.”

Shildrick studied the recordings with a team that included a psychiatrist and a cardiologist.

“The psychiatrist in the team was very shocked,” she says. “These were people who successfully played the part of the grateful patient, but who had completely different inner feelings.

The patients could report things like they had never liked sausages before and now they had cravings for them, or that they had never had racist opinions before, but now they did. They didn’t recognise themselves. And they spent a lot of time wondering who the donors were.”

One question that the study brings to the fore is whether it may be better for the transplant patients to know who the donors were. On a deeper level it asks questions of what we humans can and cannot do to our bodies.

“We live in an age when technology makes it possible to do things to our bodies that we couldn’t imagine before. Transplant surgery is just one example. It is becoming less likely that we will live our lives in the same unchanging body.

But the question is whether we can keep up mentally and culturally.”