"Zandy takes her subject-the living, writing, and teaching of the American working-class experience-deeply into a regrettably obscure area of cultural studies, one which she is eminently able to treat."--Martha Banta, author of Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct

"Janet Zandy's Hands puts critical studies of the human body into creative synergy with the so-far understudied but crucial topic of class. Hands provides the critical paradigm and reading list for the mind-body connection in American literature. Its graceful prose is energized by the author's bone-deep knowledge of the angles of vision of this nation's working class."-Cecelia Tichi, author of Exposs and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900-2000

"This is an important, original, unsettling book. Nobody writes with more analytic passion about working life than Janet Zandy."-Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work

What are two hands worth?

In linking forms of cultural expression to labor, occupational injuries, and deaths, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work centers what is usually decentered--the complex culture of working-class people. Janet Zandy begins by examining the literal loss of lives to unsafe jobs and occupational hazards. She asks critical and timely questions about worker representation--who speaks for employees when the mills, mines, factories, and even white-collar cubicles shut down? She presents the voices of working-class writers and artists, and discusses their contribution to knowledge and culture.

This innovative study reveals the flesh and bone beneath the abstractions of labor, class, and culture. It is an essential contribution to the emerging field of working-class studies, offering a hybrid model for bridging communities and non-academic workers to scholars and institutions of knowledge.

Janet Zandy is a professor of language and literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writing, Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness, and What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies.