Heyes, Cressida

Professor of Political Science,
University of Alberta (Canada)

Discourses about work in the global north frequently use the impact of work practices on sleep to exemplify particular forms of exploitation that need more or less serious remediation: working long hours eats into sleep; shiftwork or unpredictable work schedules or time-exploitative practices such as “clopening” are detrimental to sleep hygiene; doing a double shift of domestic labour and paid work outside the home can interrupt sleep; working from home can turn spaces previously reserved for sleep into an extension of the office. Bodies that are exhausted by poor work practices are often represented as unhealthy bodies, in part because they are not rejuvenated or revivified by good or good enough sleep.
The English idiom “beauty sleep” was coined in 1828 as a distinctively feminine practice of securing enough quality sleep—especially earlier in the night—so as to gain the physical benefits of rest. “Beauty sleep” improved one’s complexion, made eyes brighter, and diminished wrinkles. For privileged white women in the global north it was a code not only for appearing youthful and desirable, but also signalled a lifestyle of health-responsible leisure. Having enough time to get one’s “beauty sleep” is more materially significant than the physical appeal such sleep generates. That the term is now used primarily humorously perhaps signals that sleep has exceeded its aesthetic value to the individual.
Nonetheless, in this paper I argue that state regulation (or lack of it) of work has an aesthetic dimension: the effects of overwork and irregular work on the bodies of citizens are represented, diversely, as indicating a good “work ethic” (understood as docility under exploitation), or (conversely) a failure to take responsibility for one’s sleep hygiene. States are increasingly interested in regulating sleep—less and less through the traditional means of health and safety regulations that organize high-risk occupations such as long-distance drivers or pilots by limiting their hours, and more and more through education campaigns and other individualizing approaches that stress how getting enough sleep makes one a more productive worker and responsible citizen. In this paper, I outline some of these strategies in the US and UK contexts, showing how public health campaigns for better sleep use specific iconography, visual technologies, and rhetorical associations between a well-rested body, an attractive body, and a responsible body, to capture and tame the temporal problems created by neoliberal work practices under late capitalism.