Canadian Bacon Barbie

 I read “Listening to Action-Related Sentences Activates Front-parietal Motor Circuits,” by Marco Tettamanti et al. (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17.2 (2005): 273-281)) and it got me thinking about the connection between rhetorical acts and bodily acts in a new way. The article claims that when individuals hear sentences that describe bodily acts (i.e. “I grasp the hammer”), the part of the brain responsible for those motor actions is stimulated. Previous research had shown that seeing someone perform an action has the same effect on what scientists call “mirror neurons.” The discursive part of this has cool implications for rhetoric, filling in the bodily part of what folks like Kenneth Burke had already learned about form in general (i.e. that audiences have expectations that are gratified when they are fulfilled by acertain forms).

So when audiences here “You have nothing to fear….” they fill in “but fear itself” because part of them recognizes this antimetabole. Presumably, then, when a bodily action is involved in language, the audience also participates. A key part to the Tettamanti at al. article, however, is the caveat that this function occurs “only when the observed actions belong to the observer’s motor repertoire” (273) and only when the observer (or listener) recognizes himself or herself in the agent performing the act. So someone who is not trained in ballet might not find their mirror neurons firing when someone says “I did a pirouette.”Anyway, I found this stuff interesting because of this article I’m working on about rhetorical bodies and the woman worker in WWII. Recruiters and propagandists tried to make technical work seem familiar to women with refrains like this one:

If you’ve sewed on buttons, or made buttonholes, on a machine,

You can learn to do spot welding on airplane parts.

If you’ve used an electric mixer in your kitchen,

You can learn to run a drill press

If you’ve followed recipes exactly in making cake,

                                    You can learn to load shells.

They also tried to describe the actions women would perform on different jobs. One writer described welding as follows:

You hold your torch in your right hand (or left hand, as the case might be) at an angle of about 60 degrees to the seam. In your other hand, you hold a welding rod, called a filler, at about a 60 degree angle to the tip of your torch. It is this rod that is going to melt and fill up the crack between the two pieces, creating the seam. With rod in one hand, and torch in the other, you begin to move both of them along the crack between the two pieces of metal. (141)

Both of these examples would seem to affect the brains and bodies of readers–if they identified themselves as or with the agent in these sentences. The stuff equating sewing buttons with spot welding is genius, actually, because the audience would presumably be familiar with the former and would therefore be making a connection between a familiar bodily movement and an unfamiliar one. But Burke comes in here again–identification is key.

Anyway, I’m not sure what my point is except that I think this stuff is cool.

Maybe it’s because I plan on dressing up as I Love Lucy for Hallowe’en, but I feel like perhaps the last, oh, 50 years or so have not happened. Here’s my evidence:

• http://www.hasbro.com/dreamtown/default.cfm?page=Entertainment/tour
• http://www.hasbro.com/tonka/default.cfm?page=browse&product_id=20231#

Let’s all boycott Hasbro. Please. They are sending out lines like “Boys. They’re just built different.” (Tonka trucks are apparently “Built for boyhood”) and the Rose Petal Cottage, “A lightweight cottage that’s made just for her with beautiful appliances and accessories that she can arrange however she likes.” I know this is nothing new. But seriously, can’t toy designers come up with some more interesting toys? I thought we’d be over this by now.

This is from “Dress of Women: A Critical Introduction to the Symbolism and Sociology of Clothing”:

1) “cloth is a living tissue evolved by us for social use as much as fur or feathers are evolved for individual use”  (15)

2) “The mincing, twittering gait, supposed to be ‘feminine’ is only ’skirtine’–it has nothing to do with sex” (34)

3) “If women were true to their real place and duty they would steadily lift the world by demanding a higher standard of character and conduct in men; whereas, as it is, they steadily hold back the world by demanding a higher standard of expense” (102-103)

All in all, and interesting social analysis of fashion and gender. Nothing groundbreaking, but you know, interesting for its time.