Description: 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.
Review Quotes: 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 "