Sleep with Spectators

Feminist Performance and Practice

A rejuvenating look at sleep's integral role in feminist practice, critique, and imagination

Inequality is notoriously exhausting to confront, but through theater, performance art, and theory, feminist artists and thinkers have explored a radical counter to this exhaustion: sleep. Centering creative work on this restorative practice, Sleep with Spectators is a refreshing and visionary counterhistory of feminism that offers sleep as a tool for imagining new ways of living – ones that prioritize not only rest but also care and interdependence.

Taking performance as a unique means of perceiving private and unconscious aspects of daily life, Danielle Drees draws from opera, plays, and avant-garde theater to find instances of sleep and sleeplessness as novel embodiments of core feminist concerns. Among her subjects are Sarah Kane's free verse text 4.48 Psychosis; María Irene Fornés's queer drama of racial–sexual transformation, Enter THE NIGHT; and Regina José Galindo's America's Family Prison, in which Galindo, her partner, and their baby spent twenty-four hours in a "family-sized" cell rented from a private prison outfitter. Adeptly engaging this fascinating collection of international archival material through the lenses of Marxist feminism, trans and queer studies, and disability studies, Sleep with Spectators illuminates how sleep performances reveal and critique inequalities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability.

Idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary, Sleep with Spectators charts an original path through the feminist performance archive, presenting new ways of indexing injustice and interrogating the political conditions of rest.

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