Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship

Elana Gomel, Stephen Weninger

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

    3 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This article deals with the representation of identical twins in the films Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway and Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg. It situates the films in a cultural and political context of the 20th-century controversies surrounding the issues of evolution, reproduction and cloning. The article claims that twinship represents the corporeal economy of the Same, whose ideological meanings have been shaped by the history of eugenics and social Darwinism. Identical twinship inscribes a utopia of the perfect, unchanging and self-identical body, opposed to the unpredictability, confusion and contingency of sexual reproduction and evolutionary history. The films under discussion critique the utopian ideology of twinship and its imaginary cancellation of difference as narcissistic and deadly.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)19-35
    Number of pages17
    JournalBody & Society
    Volume9
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Sept 2003

    Scopus Subject Areas

    • Social Psychology
    • Health(social science)
    • Cultural Studies

    User-Defined Keywords

    • biology
    • body
    • cinema
    • monster
    • symmetry

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