How Handedness Shapes Lived Experience, Intersectionality, and Inequality: Hand and World

by Peter Westmoreland

Overview

This book delivers philosophy’s first sustained examination of handedness: being left-handed, right-handed, etc. It engages literature from phenomenology and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, laterality studies, cognitive science and psychology, gender studies and feminist philosophy, sociology, political science, and more to provide a systematic accounting of the nature of handedness, its basis in lived experience, its effects on bodily performance, its role in varieties of inequality, and its part in oppression and liberation.
As a radical asymmetry in the body, handedness plays a key role in human flourishing. It informs both personal bodily movement and social life, from handshakes and high fives to high tech tools made for one hand or the other. Moreover, with left-handers making up just 10% of the population, handedness presents a significant inequality in lived experience. To live and live well, we must understand handedness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031238925
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	03/13/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Peter Westmoreland is a professor in the Ethics Institute at St. Petersburg College, USA. His work has appeared in journals such as the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and Laterality. His co-edited volume Silence, implicites et non-dits chez Rousseau/ Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau was published in 2020.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: The Lived Experience of the Left.- 2 A Phenomenology of Handedness.- 3 Act Like a Right-Hander: Right Hand Bias in Norms of Proximate Space Inhabitation.- 4 The Phenomenology of Asymmetry and Distinguishing Left and Right.- 5 Throwing Like a Left-Hander: Impacts of Handedness on Athletic Performance.- 6 Sexism Caught Right-Handed: The Norms of Intersecting Gender and Handedness Theory (NIGHT).- 7 Harms of Handedness.- 8 Liberation in the Dexteronormative Society.

Editorial Reviews

This is an excellent laterality book that deserves to be read and read again. … For those interested in rethinking the very basis of what handedness means to develop new theoretical models of handedness, Westmoreland’s book certainly is worth a read. It has been a long time since I have so found so many new impulses to think about my research in a single text.” (Sebastian Ocklenburg, Laterality, June 2, 2023)

From the Publisher