Queered individuality: cultural responses to conjoined babies

Abstract Cultural fascination towards conjoined babies draws on tension between the myth of a discrete non-disabled ‘individual’ that enjoys sovereign agency over their bodymind, and porous existence in a globally interdependent world. I analyse fictional and non-fictional conjoined twins from the 1970s to the present within a Kristevan framework to unpick the normalisation strategy of non-emergency separation, reading this as informed by Kleinian projective identification. Conjoined babies evoke the repressed knowledge that we have all been intrasubjective in the womb. To resist the return of this knowledge, and to reiterate the non-disabled self as a discrete ‘individual’, non-disabled authors instead project outwards onto conjoined babies.