A provocative new book edited by EKU Honors Program Director Dr. Linda Frost will help readers better understand the everyday challenges faced by conjoined twins.

“Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The Lives of Millie-Christine McKoy and Daisy and Violet Hilton,” recently published by the University of Wisconsin Press, chronicles the twins’ lives through their own memoirs.

Daisy and Violet Hilton were English twins born in 1908, Millie-Christine McKoy African-American twins born in 1851. The McKoys, born slaves, were kidnapped and taken to Great Britain, where they worked as entertainers until they were reunited with their mother in an emotional chance encounter. The Hiltons, cast away by their horrified mother at birth, worked on the carnival circuit as vaudeville performers until the World War II economy forced them to the burlesque stage.

Frost, who had earlier authored “Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877,” said she became interested in pursuing a book on the conjoined twins “once I started to see all the different ways in which these women’s life stories were told, not simply by themselves, but by others.

“You see pretty quickly that being physically connected to another person was much more of an issue for those who encountered these women than it was for the women themselves,” Frost added. “In fact … the women’s stories as they themselves told them actually redefine the whole notion of subjectivity and what determines our most fundamental sense of personhood. Reading their stories shows us how they constructed their selves in language, which also tells us something about the way they understood those selves to be and function.”

Frost, also an associate professor of English at EKU, continued: “No question hangs more heavily over these women than the extent of and limits to their sexual lives. While Chang and Eng Bunker, the ‘original’ Siamese twins, both married and fathered over a dozen children between them, Violet Hilton was denied a marriage license by 21 states on ‘moral’ grounds.”

The book also examines the role of the medical community as well as questions of race.

Margaret E. Kansa, great-great-great-granddaughter of Eng Bunker, said Frost is “careful not to treat these women as subjects of pity, disgust or intrigue, but as humans with challenging and unusual circumstances.”

The book “is a delight to read,” said Robert Bogdan of Syracuse University. “Frost shows what can be accomplished by taking people who were too often dismissed as irrelevant, too fringe to be taken seriously, and embracing them as subjects of cultural analysis.”