Issue 41, Spring 2023
Guest-edited by Aleksandra Kaminska, Dayna McLeod & Alanna Thain
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.