Left-Handers as Subjects of Science

Abstract

In this chapter and the next I engage in two case studies. The first concerns left-handed people and studies aimed at answering the question of whether left-handers have reduced longevity compared to right-handers. (A version of this chapter has appeared as “Biopolitics and the Longevity of Left-Handers” (Árnason 2017), where I discuss the research on left-handers and longevity in a slightly different context.) In the first section I shall begin by briefly discussing the history of left-handedness and, in the second section, how this phenomenon emerged as an object of scientific study. In the third section, I shall discuss in some detail three studies on the longevity of left-handers. In the fourth and last section I discuss the production of knowledge about left-handers in the context of the modern régime of truth.