Millie and Christine McKoy were born in Columbus County, North Carolina in 1851: enslaved, Black, female, and conjoined. Millie and Christine McKoy were not given a choice about whether they would be bought or sold, displayed, or examined. They were born into what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls a position of unfreedom. Like Chang and Eng Bunker, another pair of North Carolina twins, Millie and Christine McKoy disrupted concepts of bodily autonomy, disability, race, and gender. In her presentation, Ms. Mobley examines how race, gender, and disability interact to produce notions of the imperfect body: How do we talk about how bodies come into being? What kinds of rights are afforded to which kinds of bodies? How might we reconsider whose bodies are framed as imperfect? How do cultural understandings of race, gender, disability, and medicine influence which bodies are deemed abnormal or monstrous? Using archival research gathered from the National Medical Library at the National Institutes of Health, the Historic Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the North Carolina State Archives, this paper explores the McKoy twins' challenge to the "normal" body.

Izetta Autumn Mobley, Doctoral Candidate, American Studies, is a native Washingtonian and graduate of Brown University. Ms. Mobley is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on art, public history, material and visual culture, gender, race, and disability. She is the author of the cultural landscape project 14th Street: A Love Letter, which chronicles the demographic and community changes along the 14th street corridor in Washington, D.C. Her dissertation project, Troublesome Properties examines the role of photography in establishing Black citizenship and the abled body in 19th century America. As a cultural worker, facilitator, and educator, Ms. Mobley has 15 years’ experience specializing in youth development, community capacity building, and equity education.