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The Politics of Lefthandedness

B.F. Price

“On Telling Left from Right”:

The research of Corballis and Beale (1971) presented several theories about handedness (bilateral asymmetry):

• An animal with perfect bilateral symmetry cannot tell left from right. Humans—alone of all the animals—are bilaterally asymmetrical.


• Left-right differentiation may have evolved when humans began using tools, and not (as previously thought) when humans began wielding swords.


• Children have trouble with left-right differentiation and must be taught to discriminate. Animals cannot differentiate unless the left and right nodes of their brains are severed surgically.


• Tests using mirror-imaged photographs of the natural world (a marsh) and man-made world (Las Vegas) have determined that humans have changed their environment into an asymmetrical one. Bilateral symmetrists cannot navigate in it.

Being Lefthanded (1948):

Most lefthanders try to live by blending into the righthanded world. As a result, the lefthanded are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though their motives may be good.

In trying to make accommodations the lefthander’s motives may in fact be quite virtuous. He may begin by being kind, considerate, patient, generous, even modest and self-sacrificing. On the other hand, his motives may also be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest.

What usually happens? The accommodations don’t come off very well. He becomes distracted or forgetful and acts in a lefthanded manner. He decides to exert greater control over his lefthandedness. He becomes still more accommodating. He slips up.

He begins to think life doesn’t treat him right. While admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his trouble? Is he not trying to be kind?

He is a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if only he manages his lefthandedness.

Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, and self-pity, the lefthanded steps on the toes of righthanders who then retaliate.

[Lefthanders Anonymous: A Guide to Overcoming the Lefthanded Disability, 1948]

Being Lefthanded (1998):

The lefthander must admit that she has made herself powerless — that a life devoted to accommodating the righthanded has become unmanageable. She must make a moral inventory of herself, then make a conscious decision to devote her life and will to the being lefthanded.

She must be entirely ready to accept her lefthandedness. She must be entirely ready to remove all desire to accommodate the righthanded world.

Only a complete restoration of her belief system can return the lefthanded to sanity.

[Lefthanders Anonymous: A Guide to Overcoming the Righthanded Disability, 1998]

“Passing” as Lefthanded:

Although born righthanded, a broken right arm forced Jessie to write, eat, drive and otherwise live life as a lefthander. Thus began a process of sensitization to seemingly routine tasks which were now defamiliarized. She was forced to rent an automatic car, as driving her stick shift was impossible. Doors opened the “wrong” way. Bathing and grooming were awkward. This defamiliarization allowed her to see the world in a fresh way, a lefthanded way. As a result, she began questioning long-held assumptions. This questioning lasted only until the cast was removed.

“Passing” as Righthanded:

Although born lefthanded, Marla was careful never to reveal this in public. When alone, she practiced being righthanded for hours and hours. She remembered to pass on the right, enter and exit through the right-hand door, eat with her right hand, shake hands with her right hand. Over time, these actions became so natural that she lost her ability to perform lefthanded.

“Passing” Between the Left and Right:

Belinda suffered from periodic bouts of writer’s block. She finally tracked down the cause: the block was a manifestation of her attempts to write righthanded. Once she began writing lefthanded, her writer’s block eased somewhat.

That was when she made other discoveries. Many beliefs she had held about the writing process itself were themselves righthanded: you must write every day; you should write nonsense until the “real” words came out; you must begin a story at the beginning and proceed linearly until reaching the end; you needed to show several characters interacting in order to tell the story; a story needs conflict and rising action culminating in a climax; your fiction must not be didactic.

One by one, she began testing and—when appropriate—abandoning her belief in handedness.

Left Hanging:

Ronald had a difficult time in kindergarten. He couldn’t tie his shoelaces, couldn’t write, and couldn’t perform many of the arts & crafts activities expected of him. The school counselor met with him and determined he was naturally lefthanded. His parents, religious fundamentalists, forbade his using his left hand, thinking it the hand of the devil. The principal and counselor met with the family’s pastor, who in turn met with the parents and reassured them that the use of the left hand was not satanic. His parents then gave their approval for Ronald to began using his left hand. He quickly caught up with his peers.

When he became an adult, Ronald decided that he was actually a righthander who had been “converted” by lefthanded teachers. He stopped using his left hand and began retraining himself in the use of his right hand. Unfortunately, he still couldn’t tie his shoelaces or write with his right hand.

To compensate, he began wearing loafers and dictating all his correspondence to a secretary.

He’s now a successful speechwriter for several major politicians and a regular pundit on PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC, CNN, CBN, MSNBC, and FOX.

Walking with the Left Hand:

The Situationists developed several effective ways to break out of the righthanded trance. One way was the dérive, or “movement without goal,” where you open yourself to whatever you come in contact with, thus exposing yourself to an entire spectrum of feelings and experiences entirely by chance.

Shooting with the Left Hand:

In an archery contest, if the stakes are earthenware tiles the righthanded archer shoots with skill. When the stakes are belt buckles he becomes hesitant, and if the stakes are pure gold he becomes nervous and confused. There is no difference to his skill but, because the stakes are something he prizes, he allows outward considerations to weigh on his mind.

Should the archer pull the bow with his left hand, he will transfer his focus to the act itself. He becomes aware only of the feel of bow and string in unfamiliar hands; of muscles taking on unfamiliar tasks; of a mind focusing on unfamiliar actions. He cannot think of the stakes.
All those who consider external things important are rendered stupid within.

[Chuang-Tsu]

Climbing with the Left Hand:

“So often activism is based on what we are against, what we don’t like, what we don’t want. And yet we manifest what we focus on. And so we are manifesting yet ever more of what we don’t want, what we don’t like, what we want to change.

“So for me, activism is about a spiritual practice as a way of life. And I realized I didn’t climb the tree because I was angry at the corporations and the government; I climbed the tree because when I fell in love with the redwoods I fell in love with the world. So it is my feeling of ‘connection’ that drives me, instead of my anger and feelings of being disconnected.”

[Julia Butterfly Hill]

Touching with the Left Hand:

Détournement, another technique derived from Situationism, involves altering familiar images, environments and events to reverse or subvert their meaning. For example, Guy Debord had the book A Situationist Scrapbook: An Endless Adventure, An Endless Passion, An Endless Banquet bound in sandpaper so it would scratch and alter any surface it touched, and made it unpleasant for the book lover to fondle and admire.

Speaking with the Left Hand:

In a society that is increasingly right-handed, organized by the power of modifying things and reforming structures on the basis of this scriptural model, transformed little by little into regimented movements, the binomial set left-right can often be replaced by its general equivalent and indicator, the binominal set production-consumption.

[Michel de Certeau]

Catching Right, Throwing Left:

Tom stole into work one day and switched all the righthanded scissors to lefthanded. Since his fellow workers only occasionally used scissors, the switch went largely unnoticed. The righthanders had a vague feeling there was something awkward, clumsy, even unnatural about the act of cutting things, and they began to find excuses to avoid doing so. The lefthanders, on the other hand, noticed nothing different.

Look Left & Right Before Crossing:

Jimmy, a skateboarder, places small stickers at strategic locations, such as on the back of metal road signs, where they will be noticed by idling drivers. While some are simple advertisements for skating products, his favorite has a picture of Andre the Giant with the word “OBEY” underneath. Jimmy likes it because his father told him Andre was a pro wrestler and Jimmy likes pro wrestling, and thinks the “OBEY” shows the power of Andre and by extension all pro wrestlers.

Fred, a retired dot-com millionaire, has made it his hobby to walk around town with a box cutter (the kind allegedly used by 14 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001), scraping these stickers off the back of metal road signs. He especially dislikes the Andre the Giant stickers because, he says, “it’s an anarchist screed.”

Fred’s efforts are futile, as any idling driver can see.

Hand Held to the Fire:

When you pour a cup of tea with your left hand, you are aware of the kinesthesia of extending your arm and touching your hand to the teapot, lifting it and pouring the water. Finally the water touches your teacup and fills it, and you stop pouring and put the teapotdown precisely, as in the Japanese tea ceremony.

You become aware that each precise movement has dignity.

[Chögyam Trungpa]

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.