How is sleep a mediated and mediating phenomenon? When and how does sleep become recorded and knowable, shareable and communicable, by and between bodies, people, media, and between our own sleeping and waking selves? In what ways are we together in sleep? How do we know and care for ourselves and each other as sleepers? If sleep can be social, how must we alter or expand our sense of the social itself? This special issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality on SLEEPING/DORMIR asks how (inter)media forms and practices are critical for rethinking sleep in our restless times.
Through sociable, experiential, experimental, and critical approaches to sleep’s mediations across queer, racialized, gendered, and classed lifeworlds, the articles in this issue stage encounters with sleep across media forms that expand our shared somatic sensibilities. In particular, a renewed attention to the inequities of sleep that result from the labouring body, make us ask: what kinds of un/conscious labour mediates sleep and how is this work invisibilized, manifested, derailed, celebrated, and/or complicated? Sleep moves across, lingers, and expands in critical thresholds of consciousness, but also between the public and private, individual and collective, body and environment, matter and mind—all of which contribute to making sleep a site of radical vulnerability and social risk in a way that requires social forms of care, including care for the collective imaginaries of sleep. Media have been critical for representing sleep, but also for animating its challenges to capture and display. The articles in this issue engage with a multiplicity of media and disciplines to create conversations across forms and practices that question and expand the methodologies and epistemologies of sleep knowledge, all with the aim to better address the heterogeneity of sleep.
Summary
Introduction. The Sleeper’s Unrest.
Aleksandra Kaminska (Université de Montréal)
Dayna McLeod (McGill University)
Alanna Thain (McGill University)
Articles
L’œil et l’oreille du sommeil. Lire les vidéo-polysomnographies avec des infirmières de nuit
Amélie Barbier (École Pratique des Hautes Études)
The New Horizontal Worker: Privacy, Sexuality, and Professionalism in the Digital Bedroom
Cressida J. Heyes (University of Alberta) and Hannah Haugen (University of Victoria)
Everyone Enjoys a Siesta After Lunch in the West Indies”: Fictions of Labour and Languor
Nicole Dufoe (University of Toronto)
Who can afford to dream?
Saelyx Finna and Mia Imani (independent scholars)
Practices and Environments of Collective Sleep in Twenty-First-Century Latin American Film
Zaira Zarza (Université de Montréal)
Des dormeurs confiés à nos regards. Figurer et éprouver la sociabilité paradoxale du sommeil
Camille Bui (Institut ACTE, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
The Scent of Sleep: On Night Knowledge and Its Atmospheres
Sandra Huber (Concordia University)
Listening with insomnia
Anabelle Lacroix (University of New South Wales)
Bedtime Stories: Audiobooks, Podcasts, and Reading as Listening (and Sleeping)
Josh Dittrich (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
Do Humans Dream of Electric Ads?
Doron Darnov (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Research-creation
Beware the LOLcats : une recherche-création sur les illustrations populaires du sommeil préindustriel
Albertine Thunier (Université de Montréal)
Video Essay
Watch me sleep: self-surveillance and middle-aging queer
Dayna McLeod (McGill University)
Guest Artists
Grèves perlées
Eloïse Vo (Hes-So HEAD — Genève / EPFL Alice)
Hors dossier
Sacrifices numériques : la mémoire au-delà des algorithmes
Hernán Ulm (Universidad Nacional de Salta, Argentine)