From the twin vaudeville acts of the 1920s to reality tv shows like Kate Plus 8, multiple births have remained especially potent for popular culture narratives throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a seemingly endless source of fascination, child multiples in North America have been critical sites of public interest, celebration and anxiety. This has lent itself to wide representation in advertising and film. At perilous times, multiples have often served as a testament to the well-being of the national body and American domestic life. The wildly popular Dionne Quintuplets thus became symbols of modernity and progress during the languish of the depression era. Likewise, the Fultz quadruplets became icons of a thriving Black childhood in the civil rights era.
This paper will explore the ways in which “multiple birth sensations” such as the Dionne Quints and the Fultz Quads are represented in three widely distributed newspapers and popular motion picture films between 1934 and 1965. By analyzing popular representations of multiples, I seek to explore the social nature of twinship/multiples and the ways in which the spectacle of multiplehood frames and interacts with historically specific understandings of children’s bodies, consumption practices, health and identities. I argue that “multiple birth sensations” embody and perform intensified versions of historically situated ideas about ‘the child.’ In making this argument, I will closely consider the gendered and racial dimensions of representations of multiples and the aesthetics of cuteness embedded in multiple birth narratives. Lastly, I will attend to the ways in which multiplehood can also challenge, or queer, social presuppositions about childhood and identity.
About the presenterHeather L. Reel
Heather Reel is a doctoral student in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. She holds a Master’s degree in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University. Heather’s current research interests include histories of childhood health and disease; childhood and the body; histories of motherhood; and African American childhoods. She has published articles in the Journal of Feminism & Psychology, and contributed a co-authored chapter to the 2015 anthology The Mother Blame Game.