Sleep with Spectators

<P><B>A rejuvenating look at sleep's integral role in feminist practice, critique, and imagination</B></P><P>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, <I>Sleep with Spectators</I> 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.</P><P>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 <I>4.48 Psychosis</I>; María Irene Fornés's queer drama of racial–sexual transformation, <I>Enter THE NIGHT</I>; and Regina José Galindo's <I>America's Family Prison, </I>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, <I>Sleep with Spectators</I> illuminates how sleep performances reveal and critique inequalities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability.</P><P>Idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary, <I>Sleep with Spectators</I> charts an original path through the feminist performance archive, presenting new ways of indexing injustice and interrogating the political conditions of rest.</P><P><B>Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.</B></P>