Episode 04: Working from bed

In this episode: In this episode, Cressida and Joshua talk about working from bed with Hannah Haugen, a law student at the University of Victoria and co-author with Cressida of “The New Horizontal Worker" (2023). After revisiting the dark days of COVID-19 virtual classes (3:47), they discuss the ways privacy and intimacy are compromised when forced to work from bed (6:15). By contrast, how have celebrities such as Frida Kahlo, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, or Hugh Hefner worked from bed? (12:52); meanwhile, ordinary people are vulnerable, forced to expose private space and self to professors, teachers, or bosses in the name of professionalism. Hannah and Cressida move from celebrity beds to sex work and sleep-streaming (23:20), and Joshua asks (29:43), what are beds for? We discuss the history and anthropology of the bed, and the emergence of the public and private spheres (33:55). How has WFB evolved “post-pandemic”? (37:33) Finally, a paradox (46:27): if sleep is an absence, how can it have so much meaning? (Also: where’s Tom?!)

Mentioned in this episode: Thumbnail is John G. Zimmerman, Hugh Hefner working in bed, colour photograph, Chicago, 1973. © John G. Zimmerman Archive, reproduced with permission in Cressida J. Heyes and Hannah Haugen, “The New Horizontal Worker: Privacy, Sexuality, and Professionalism in the Digital Bedroom.” Intermédialités 41, Spring 2023 (open access). What is a “libertine”? Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America; Louis XIV’s rituals; John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Bed-In. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History, and Hilary Hinds, A Cultural History of Twin Beds; Shakespeare’s “second-best bed;” Katie Glaskin and Richard Chenhall, ed. Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives.

Transcript:

Hannah: 0:00

This dichotomy of like sleep is absence of life. Like you're gone. Dude, I was dead last night. The language that we use to describe being there or being not there. But the way life sneaks into our sleep, even if we pretend it doesn't.

Cressida: 0:38

My name is Cressida Heyes, and I'm your host. I'm a professor in the departments of political science and philosophy at the University of Alberta. I'm often to be found at about 2.30 in the morning doom scrolling, I had a baby who didn't sleep, which I'm not sure I ever really recovered from. That's given me a personal and academic interest in all things sleep-related.

Joshua: 1:02

And I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I'm a PhD student, also at the University of Alberta, studying post-work and the politics of productivity. I am myself someone who never figured out how to sleep, and only until recently averaged a brisk four hours of sleep at night. So I have a personal stake in this series, I'm sure like many of our listeners, and I'm so excited to learn more about the topic. You've heard of working from home, but have you heard of working from bed?

Cressida: 1:36

I have, Joshua. Yes.

Joshua: 1:38

Many of us became familiar with working from home during the pandemic, during COVID-19, but some of us, maybe a smaller percentage of us, became familiar with working from bed. Why are we thinking about working from bed today?

Cressida: 1:54

I'm glad you asked. It's because I think it's an issue that relates to sleep in lots of different ways. I mean, obviously beds are connected to sleep, and work is connected to sleep. And so in 2020 and 2021, when I, like many other people who work in education, had to suddenly start teaching students online, if I could persuade them to put their cameras on, I would often see that they were sitting or lying on a bed. And of course it makes sense, right? If you're in a certain sense privileged enough to have your own space, but the only place that's really yours in a shared house or an apartment or whatever is a bedroom. Not to assume that everybody has their own bedroom, but you know, many, many people, at least in Western Canada, do. I would see my students there. And it was interesting how different people took different approaches, I think. So some people were just blatantly sitting in the middle of what my grandmother would have called a slovenly bed. Ah, yes. Like just with the sheets and pillows, you know, as they'd obviously got out of them, probably not that long before, and their stuff just all around them. And other people seemed to have sort of curated their bed so that it was more presentable. And other people could look at it in a way that was acceptable to them, and maybe they were imagining our reactions, I don't know. But I had a student, Hannah Haugen, who we talked to today, and she wrote a really excellent final paper and gave even better a presentation about working from bed. And I started to see it everywhere. So uh there was all of this stuff in the media, especially in the UK, actually, more in the UK, but but also in Canada and the US, all of this stuff about how to work from home, how to do it right, how to appear on Zoom properly.

Joshua: 4:01

Right.

Cressida: 4:02

But also if you have to work from your bed, which is this kind of, you've got just enough space at home that you can work from home, but you've just got this little, you know, private space is your room. How to do that? So Hannah and I ended up publishing an article, and in that article we talk about the politics of working from bed. And so it's connected to sleep through these two sort of laterally, through these two topics of beds and work.

Hannah: 4:45

So hello, my name is Hannah Haugen. I come from Treaty Six Territory, a miswaciwaskiakan Edmonton. I now live on Wasanish territories as well as a Esquimalt and Songheese peoples. I currently attend the JD/JID program at the University of Victoria. And I took an undergraduate degree at the U of A in Political Science, Gender Studies and Native Studies, and was taught by Dr. Heyes two separate times, including surrounding the politics of sleep, which my term paper about placing remote workers in proximity to sex workers turned into the piece we are discussing today.

Cressida: 5:33

Yes. Hannah was an amazing student, and we ended up co-authoring an article. Before we talk about the ideas in that piece, Hannah, can you tell us what the pandemic was like from your point of view? Because your work in the Politics of Sleep seminar started from you talking about working from your bed.

Hannah: 5:55

Yes. I wanted to attack this idea of my bed because I've always been a person that is obsessed with space. I like need to have the space that I work and the space that I eat. I'm a big couch person. In the pandemic, those spaces became so vital to me, like not losing it, right? I say to people, I've been through like some pretty not fun stuff in my life. Like many people, like we all have our different like scars of humanity. But I say to people that I would rather relive my deepest depression than the winter of like 2020 to 2021. Yeah. Like that is like you could not pay me to relive how I felt in that like December through February. And that's when I think about like my bed and what it was when I was like, well, I'm so tired and so sad that those boundaries that I'd set up of like, here's where I study, and here's where and all that energy, I was losing those boundaries, and really dug into like what the point of my bed was and why that changing of boundaries coincided with my health, and why it doesn't for other people.

Joshua: 7:30

Yeah that everybody in your class or your office was going to see. And for a lot of people, Hannah included, that immediately raised questions of what am I revealing? What happens when the world is suddenly let into this space? Why do I feel the need to have some things in the frame and other things not in the frame? Why do I feel the need to curate? What is that? What do these things say about me? And what how is this changing my relationship to my most maybe in air quotes intimate space? Yeah. Right.

Cressida: 8:11

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's um particularly important to avoid suggest the suggestion of sexuality. Because one of the things that we do in bed is have sex. Obviously, we have sex in other places and we do other things in bed, but the the idea that if you're working from bed, it must not connote sex.

Joshua: 8:33

Right.

Cressida: 8:33

And of course, given the advent of camming, right? Of live streaming yourself in bed, doing not just sleeping, but sexy things that people are paying to watch, which has been around for some time. I mean, not that long in the history of, you know, all things considered, but it, you know, that long predates the pandemic for sure. Yes. So the idea that you've got a video on yourself while you're in bed has that kind of, you know, Only Fans vibe. Yeah. Right. So I think the idea that you have to curate your background and yourself and what is seen in the frame comes from a bunch of different places, including don't make it sexy, that's true, you know.

Joshua: 9:18

Yeah.

Cressida: 9:19

And make it professional. That's something else that we talk about. So so I feel like the working from bed thing is intimidating for a lot of people or fraught because you're getting into some of that. Suddenly, people like your boss or your professor or your teacher are going to see your bedroom. And I know that Hannah was quite nervous about that, and that that's provided the motivation for thinking about working from bed for her. I re-watched your presentation. And I was really struck not only by your clever editing, which you know, this gen-Xer is like, I can't do anything except record myself. So I was struck with a number of students when we did video presentations, how people could sort of cleverly use visual effects to make philosophical points. But I was struck by the way that you cut between different spaces and you said, normally I like to sit on my couch and pretend to work in front of the TV. But at this point, I'm in my bed. And then there's a shot of you in your bed with your laptop. And it was really interesting as a professor to see students' spaces, as we did, you know, when people put their cameras on during uh Zoom classes, you got to see where they where they were working from. And for a lot of students, it had to be their bedroom because that might be the only space that they had that was quiet enough or private enough to take classes from. So you did it self-consciously, but there were quite a lot of people who were just sitting on their bed with their laptop because that's where they had to do it during the pandemic. So what was that like? Because for you, it sounds like it was a bit of a transgression to go to the bed to work and not great. Like your presentation has the general sort of tone of working from bed is not it's not good for you. So why for you?

Hannah: 11:30

I think that even loving your work has parts that you have to force yourself to do, and forcing myself to do anything in my bed is to me invades the safety of like joy in my bed, whether that be the joy of sleep or sex or intimacy or the very specific safety that is associated with feeling depressed, like the safety of sadness, not the anger at effort. And I think it is that difference of like forced behaviour versus like experienced life that makes the bed such a place like I don't like to work or even do like nighttime leisure. Like I will watch television on the couch, like I am not watching it in my bed. The bed is for like expressions of joy as I've like rebuilt like my safety in what people call the post-pandemic or in these last few years. And I remember part of what inspired me to think about the themes of this paper was obviously watching my peers, my like third, fourth year seminars, which is what I was doing in the pandemic time. Like, I knew a lot of my classmates. And I'm a memory of one of my classmates who, like, I won't name or give identifying features to one of our seminars just really got sidetracked, and people just started talking about how frustrated they were about everything. And I remember just hearing the like cacophonous sound of like 10 to 20 family members who this peer lived in proximity to, and like closing the door, and like her camera was off during this, but she forgot to turn her sound off. I remember hearing the sound, and then she crashes onto her bed and like turns it on, and you just sit here with like the white pillow, and and I remember she just said, You guys don't fucking get it. She just said, You don't get it.

Cressida: 13:39

Wow.

Hannah: 13:40

And I was like, I don't, like, I don't from like my positions of privilege, and just that authenticity that I would never dream of expecting from my peers in a classroom. It's just on its face in that time.

Joshua: 14:09

So celebrities working from bed has a long history.

Cressida: 14:13

In thinking about this, I wanted to draw a contrast between um what celebrities are usually trying to achieve by appearing in their beds. Right. And we have images in the article of Frida Kahlo, who was disabled, so an interesting case, and painted from bed. And of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, who famously hosted The Bed-In in 1969.

Joshua: 14:44

That's right. Yeah.

Cressida: 14:45

Um, and Hugh Hefner, the the media mogul and sex empire entrepreneur.

Joshua: 14:53

Yeah.

Cressida: 14:54

That's how I'm going to describe Hugh Hefner, who was one of the very first people to make his bed into a digital workplace. And he was photographed in the 70s working from his digital bed.

Joshua: 15:10

From his digital bed.

Cressida: 15:11

Yeah. So it has all of these accoutrements of what one could do digitally at the time. So kind of really cameras with film in them. Right. And old-style giant stack computers. And he was trying to work on screens. It was all very proto by today's standards. But his bed and his bed is littered with magazines, as you might expect. Yes. So, you know, he's showing he was photographed and he had those photos put into the public domain. So he's trying to show us that he's running his empire from his bed. And he there's a lot of stuff in Playboy about home decor and trying to sort of get people to organize and use domestic space in particular ways, especially men. Because that's they're aimed, it's aimed at men. There's a fantastic history of Playboy by Elizabeth Fratterigo that talks about all of this.

Joshua: 16:10

I'm trying to... so it would be advice on how to decorate?!

Cressida: 16:16

Yeah, how to create your bachelor pad.

Joshua: 16:18

I didn't know I didn't know that Playboy had that range.

Cressida: 16:23

Do you just read it for the for the articles?!

Joshua: 16:26

I didn't know it had articles either. Oh, this is fascinating, fascinating intel.

Cressida: 16:34

But yeah, Hefner, I think, thought of himself as being a “libertine,” if I can use that old-fashioned word, but but also as somebody who was sort of encouraging a kind of sexual freedom in a very entrepreneurial way that was consonant with his media and other aspects of his business empire, right? So he's sort of building connected businesses that have to do with sex and sex work, that have to do with the public sphere, that have to do with the private sphere. So there are clubs, right? Playboy clubs, but there are also there's also the advice on how to make your apartment into the right kind of sex den. Space. Right. You know, and how to serve nice cocktails and all that stuff. Yeah. And so he's trying to sort of create what what might not have been called, but we would call now a lifestyle.

Joshua: 17:35

Right. And as well, that the bed is very part of that lifestyle. Yeah. But also the mixture that he was trying to accomplish between play and work, right? That those two could blend together so seamlessly, so immediately, right? Yeah. Because it all happens in the same space.

Cressida: 17:59

Yeah.

Joshua: 18:00

Yeah.

Cressida: 18:00

Yeah. I mean, he's somebody who's doing a lot of playing. Yeah. Playboy, it's in the title.

Joshua: 18:06

Right.

Cressida: 18:06

And some of that is sex playing, and he's writing, and and you know, his his media outlets are writing about that. But he's also and that and so some of it's happening, the play is happening in bed, but the work is happening in bed as well. So it's another, you know, really messing with public and private in interesting ways. At the same time as it's upholding really very normative understandings of gender, not not traditional understandings of gender for the time, but very but normative. Like this is how men and women should be, but it's not what you thought.

Joshua: 18:45

Right.

Cressida: 18:46

You know, it's sexually liberated, right? “Liberated” in feminist scare quotes. Right. Yeah.

Joshua: 18:52

Yeah. We won't knight Hugh Hefner as a feminist icon at this point.

Cressida: 19:01

So that's been tried, and I just think he was not a very good person in many ways. So we won't do that, but an interesting icon.

Joshua: 19:10

Challenges some of those dichotomies. Yeah.

Cressida: 19:13

Yeah. And he really kept it going right up until he died.

Joshua: 19:17

I guess the important distinction, though, is Hugh Hefner was able to challenge those boundaries or blur those distinctions between private and public in a way that white-collar worker and student are not.

Cressida: 19:33

No.

Joshua: 19:34

Right?

Cressida: 19:34

No. We're talking about different worlds, I think.

Joshua: 19:37

Yeah. What are those two worlds?

Cressida: 19:40

Well, I think the celebrity world is about creating your persona through messing with these distinctions, the public and the private.

Joshua: 19:51

Okay. That makes sense.

Cressida: 19:52

It's about saying this is the kind of special, very special person I am, because of this blurring of my public talent and my private life. And I'm letting you watch me as I blur those two things. I think for ordinary people who have white-collar jobs or students who are working from bed during the pandemic and beyond, because there's still lots of people doing it, it's vulnerable making. It's a place where you're vulnerable. And you're being forced really to expose your private life without your consent or cooperation. And that's why I took umbrage really at the media coverage is because I thought it suddenly lost its politics. Like people who ordinarily were quite critical journalists seemed to be writing about it as if it was all a joke, as if making sure that your, you know, you didn't leave your vibrator on the night table and you, you know, wore wore the right things to sit in your bed to come to work.

Joshua: 21:03

There's a whole slew of articles about what to wear that were a bit weird, but it was just immediately accepted as this is just what's happening, and this is the best way to do it. Instead of asking, should we be okay with our bedrooms becoming so publicized and curated for that perception as well.

Cressida: 21:25

Yeah. I think it I mean, it's not that I am a great believer in the distinction between illusion and reality and that I want people to be real, but I think we have to recognize the element of coercion that was involved. I mean, I had these arguments with colleagues, you know, in that time that it's very difficult to teach to a screen of black squares. It is very difficult and very alienating for sure.

Joshua: 21:51

Definitely.

Cressida: 21:52

But trying to make people put their camera on is an intrusion.

Joshua: 21:56

Yeah.

Cressida: 21:57

And you have to create some conditions where people can trust you, and there's never really any reason why they should trust anybody else.

Joshua: 22:06

Yeah.

Cressida: 22:06

And you have to sort of you're making a demand, and I felt like that demand needed to be acknowledged. So I would always say to my students, you don't have to put your camera on. It makes my life nicer, my life nicer if you do.

Joshua: 22:21

Yeah.

Cressida: 22:21

But I'm very clear that that's it's about it's about me and it's your choice.

Joshua: 22:26

Yeah.

Cressida: 22:26

And in fact, there were people who put who made themselves vulnerable and put their camera on, and I thought, oh my God.

Joshua: 22:32

You should you should turn that back on. You should turn that back off.

Cressida: 22:35

How are you living?

Joshua: 22:36

I will send a specific request to you to turn that back off!

Cressida: 22:40

Yeah, and that's what people are rightly afraid of is the judgment or the, you know, the judgment is bad enough, but the demand that you fix it. I mean, not that I knew any professors who said, why don't you tidy up before you go to you know, nobody went that far. But it seems like many employers were going that far.

Joshua: 22:57

Yeah.

Cressida: 22:58

You know, and or if they weren't, it was self-policing. It was you want to be seen as professional. Definitely. So if you're professional, where that term has been just evacuated of meaning. So if you're smart, you will make sure that you look right. And of course, people have said to me it's just the same as "dress for success" advice, and it's just the same as saying to people, you know, don't swear at work. Or all of that kind of. And I'm like, yeah, but it's I guess maybe I do have some vestigial affection for the public-private distinction because I don't actually think you should have to make your bedroom into something that matches your employer's expectations.

Joshua: 23:39

Certainly that idea of coercion and agency has an important effect on how we would feel about that changing, that curating, that performativity, right? It's Hugh Hefner very much choosing to open his private space to the public. A worker, a student, especially if they don't have a nice professor like you telling them that you know they are free to choose as they will, those people are not necessarily choosing to let people into their space, and in fact, maybe feel they have to. And they did.

Cressida: 25:01

You know, we're looking all the way back to the early 1700s when he makes getting up and going to bed into public rituals. So come and see the king, you know, get up out of bed and get dressed is like an event and a way of signaling something to do with his prestige. I think we read the paper that's about the, you know, the king's body and how we deal with the fact that famous people, especially kings, but uh not only have this public and this private persona, and it can be very hard to imagine that they actually have bodies that need to sleep. But you know, there's there's an interesting kind of elision of the public and the private there, and using being in your bed as a way of signalling something. So who else is in there? Oh, Hugh Hefner, he's kind of my favourite because he has this very early technological bed where he's at once having sex with imagined Playboy bunnies and doing very early digital empire building, all from the same enormous round bed. There's a picture of it in the article.

Hannah: 26:08

And the coyness associated with Hugh Hefner's sexual bed, like sexual working bed, to me is that direct line to the like casual Zoom on my phone. Like he's too important in his like sexuality and the sexual revolution, more important than the woman he's having sex with to work anywhere but bed. And that is in that direct juxtaposition to like, what is a sex worker then? What does a person who works from bed do? And my original term paper thesis was like, Well, we're all sex workers now. Like, if we're all working from bed, we all live in the fucktory, like we're in that space in a very like undergraduate, like pushing thesis, if you will.

Cressida: 26:56

Not a bad or uninteresting thesis, though.

Hannah: 27:00

Not bad or uninteresting, but yeah, very much like that it's this thing, big reveal, right? No, that part of the paper was truly such a joy to think about and analyze, and especially the body of the sovereign, and how, in some understandings of like the perfect society, the like sovereign being embodied in men who carry families, and who that who in modern times carry workplaces, this like proverbial boss figure we have in our heads, and the different roles they would play in the digital working space in working from their beds, the different expectations they'd have, and the the power of their bodies in nonchalant and direct ways.

Cressida: 27:49

Yeah, the power to be casual is something that I think the working from bed debate really illustrates so clearly that there are some people who get to be very relaxed about it, and others who, like a lot of the sex workers, I think who are working from their beds, have to feign being casual or feign being authentic, right? You have to make this thing that you're doing from your bed look like it's real somehow, it's real sex as opposed to more conventional porn, which is you know very obviously staged and everybody looks a certain way and it's very scripted, but camming is much more informal kind of sex work. And that's at least according to the the people that I read who write about it, that's kind of its appeal to audiences is here's this person in their bed. And sometimes they're not doing sex things, sometimes they are actually sleeping. So I after we finished the paper, I discovered the genre of sleep streaming. I don't know if you've I've never we've never talked about that, but have you, as a young person, have you encountered sleep streaming? That amazes me. People who just like you know, you can watch them sleeping and then you can put coins in and they'll do things.

Hannah: 29:07

Yeah, no, I am aware of that, of that phenomenon as like a way to make money. Also, I think how so much it is adjacently connected to the explosion of casual sex work in the pandemic and in just the last, I mean, like also over just over the social media revolution. But to me, when things I've read for this paper and sex workers who talk about what they do, they're like, yes, I have sex for money, but I mostly like have connection for money. Like that's like an often theme. And that chasing of authenticity and connection that spurred from the pandemic to the point of like paying just to simulate the experience of sleeping near someone. Yeah. Whether or not it is in like a sexual fetishized way of like feeling powerful from having the ability to view someone's sleep, having it all actually be a performance. And, you know, like you'll see on TikTok and like different like places online, like people who do this sex work, like do this whole other job of content creation about their sex work and be like, my sex work like is a content creation job, and this is what my iPad schedule looks like, and this is what I'm gonna do today. And yeah, the way that cultivating that intimacy is professional work.

Joshua: 30:48

So what are beds for?

Cressida: 30:52

What are beds for? Whatever you want them to be for. I mean we do have a kind of normative vision, I think, in the contemporary global north that the bed is this safe individual and private, most importantly, private space. And it's not, as this conversation reveals, I think, in lots of different contexts. So even under the most normative conditions, it's not. It's not if you're a victim of intimate violence, it's not if you're trying to work from your bed, it's not if you're a shift worker who's hotbedding with someone who comes in when you're at work and vice versa, right? There's all sorts of exceptions. It's not if you're in a huge family and you're sharing your bed with siblings. You know, there's tons of exceptions. And so even in the history of beds, and there are a couple of really great books about the history of the bed. And they all say the way that we use beds now is not typical.

Joshua: 31:52

Not historically the norm.

Cressida: 31:56

Yeah, not culturally or historically the norm that beds were much more commonly shared.

Joshua: 32:03

What kind of bed, I guess would be another one.

Cressida: 32:06

Yes, yes, what a bed is, whether it's just a mat that you carry with you and lay out wherever you land or a pile of straw, or you know, there's all sorts of different things of what a bed is, but we've turned it into a really complicated item of furniture and used to be and still is, I think, in some ways a symbol of prestige. So buying a bed was a huge deal for early modern and pre-modern families where they were, you know, you were if you were trying to equip a home. So there's people always talk about how Shakespeare bequeathed his wife his second-best bed.

Joshua: 32:46

Do people always talk about that?!

Cressida: 32:48

Yeah.

Joshua: 32:49

Not to me.

Cressida: 32:51

Well, they always say that, and then some people think it means that he gave somebody else the best bed, and then maybe, and then other people say, well, it's because the second best bed was the marital bed. So it was a symbol of his love for her. He was giving her the bed that they had slept in together. So either way, either way, she got a bed. And that was a big deal. It was something that you wrote into your will because it was the most expensive and large and significant thing that you owned. And so beds have beds have quite a history as a a big deal.

Joshua: 33:27

Interesting. Yeah. I had no idea about the writing them into wills part. Yeah. That's fascinating.

Cressida: 33:33

Yeah. But the idea that it was yours and that you had it in your bedroom and you're the only person who slept in it is pretty new. So family bed, sleeping with your extended family, or at least with your children, still commonplace in lots of cultures. Lots of people do it today in the West, but it used to be, I think, much more ubiquitous. And then there are cultures where people sleep according to gender. So all the women sleep together in one hut and all the men sleep in another hut.

Joshua: 34:07

Right.

Cressida: 34:08

That's not uncommon. If you read the anthropology of sleep literature, you realize just how just how incredibly diverse the ways that people sleep are. Practices of sleep, we might say. And it all made the anxiety in this little 2020 to 2022, which is the window when I did a sort of really comprehensive search for working from bed. It made all of the anxiety in that window look very parochial.

Joshua: 34:40

Because in this longer history, this is not an uncommon thing to share this space. Yeah. For this to not be as obsessively private as it is today. Yeah, yeah. Right.

Cressida: 34:53

Well, and I think that we're political theorists, so we know this. And that the public-private distinction has a history and serves a lot of functions in the way that we think about politics. And the idea that the private, there's this there's this sphere called the private sphere, which is often associated with your home. It's where you go to rest if you're a man. And then when you work, you leave the home and you're a man.

Joshua: 35:26

Yep.

Cressida: 35:27

You go out and but you know, the idea that work happens in public and leisure, rest, domestic, the family happens in private.

Joshua: 35:37

Yep.

Cressida: 35:38

Is it's never been, I think, really true. Or if it's true, it's true of such a tiny proportion of families and gendered persons that it certainly is not representative. But it serves a really outsize normative function.

Joshua: 35:52

Yes.

Cressida: 35:53

So this idea that there's a public sphere and a private sphere really does a lot of heavy lifting for political thinking. And I I suddenly had to kind of revisit that literature in thinking about working from bed, because I was kind of amazed by how traditionalist the views of public and private were that were coming into these articles about how you should make sure that the lube isn't behind you or whatever. Because it seemed like there was there was a very neat story about how the bed is suddenly, as we've said, has to be this public workspace.

Joshua: 36:35

Yes.

Cressida: 36:36

And if it's going to be like where you work, then it's going to be devoid of intimacy and familial relationships and even personality. Yeah. So you're you don't get to be you, you get to be a sort of neutral corporate entity in this space. So a very old-fashioned idea about public and private came into this media coverage that was actually talking about quite a novel phenomenon, which has to do with the radical intrusion of the digital into people's homes.

Joshua: 37:13

Yeah, and it's a great example that shows how that private- public divide has been constructed over a long, long period of time because when these new events happen that make us feel uncomfortable, they show us this idea of the private, this idea of the public are blurry, right? This moment where all of a sudden I am working something public in a private space brings the construction of those spaces into our view, maybe for the first time.

Cressida: 37:53

Yeah. So so that happened, but then another contradictory thing happened, which is that well, which is that we're trying to make the private space into the public space. So we're upholding the dichotomy.

Joshua: 38:06

Right.

Cressida: 38:07

So the dichotomy is both messed with because suddenly there's a camera looking at you in bed and your boss is on the other end.

Joshua: 38:16

Right.

Cressida: 38:16

But also we're trying to uphold a very dated understanding of public space as work space and as having this kind of neutrality attaching to it. So both things are happening. One of the things that happened in the media in 2021-22, and the data set is sort of stops in 2023, is that this case was made for why if you're working from home, and especially if you're working from your bed, you should be professional. So it was kind of an analysis of what this word professional was doing in terms of class politics. And that, you know, it was not just about doing your job well or having autonomy in your job in the sort of classic sense of the term professional, but it was about disciplining people to conform to certain kinds of norms. So you have to have even the right sheets and duvet, and that you have to make sure that there is no evidence of sex in the view of the camera. And an amazing amount of work went into this. You know, this is how you do working from home on Zoom with the camera on right. And of course, some of it's gendered. So some of it is if you're a woman, make sure that you dress like this, but also advice for men as well. And so it's interesting that people are treating hybrid work environments now with ambivalence, because I know lots of people who really want to work from home. Like this is a big thing at U of A that the staff want more work from home days. And it affects our operations because if you have offices that people come to, if there's nobody in them, then it can be difficult to run the place. But at the same time, I know that working from home means that you have to appear in ways that you might not otherwise. Do you still work from home?

Hannah: 40:19

Yes, I do. So I'm a facilitator for the Indigenous Youth Outreach Program at Level Justice, which is a like justice not-for-profit. I do it while I'm a law student. And so I actually spent like all of last semester teaching online and experiencing online court, which was a whole other thing. Um two of my classrooms I was able to physically go. So the program culminates in like a mock trial in a real courtroom. And one of the courtrooms I could go to in person, and that was really, really cool. And the kids had all sorts of comments that I look different than they thought I would look, and I'm not the kind floating head in their classroom that I was. And one was like over Zoom, I was like yelling over the court speakers, being like, I'm so proud of you guys, like you did an amazing mock trial. Like, yeah, I've had a lot of chewiness in working from home. And I think right now I lean into not pretending it's not different, but not in like a negative capitalistic, like get to work so our real estate holdings still have equity value. Like, not there, but just they're different. They're different types of working, and they should be supported with different tools because of that. I feel like there was this push in, like, like you said, like into 2022 and 2023 of this, like, it's the same, companies aren't gonna lose productivity, like very like economy, neoliberal response to the work from home. And I think they are different. They're different processes of connection, of community, and of identity. And they should be treated differently, is kind of where I sit more now with this question of working from home.

Cressida: 42:18

Do you still work from your bed?

Hannah: 42:21

No, no, I don't. And I spent most of the pandemic on my like trusty, like undergrad sticker-covered laptop. And I now I have some of the like tools now. So I have dual monitors in front of me right now. Like I have a connection, I have a laptop stand, so my neck doesn't hurt as much. I have a separate keyboard and mouse that I use.

Cressida: 42:45

Yeah, so you've you've taken some of the advice, really, and you've upgraded your space and made it more professional.

Hannah: 42:53

I have 100%. I have. And also, I think I've really noticed in my like having parts of my school be at home, and then like the work I've been doing with Level Justice being from home, is I this makes me sound like a bit more conniving than I mean to be. I intentionally reveal identity signifiers in the background or not. So when I'm connecting with children and I'm trying to make a connection for like a positive learning environment through a screen, I want them to know that I have Folk Fest poster on my wall. And obviously, and I very much make sure that like adult things that could be in my bedroom are completely out of view for these children, or in the same way that elementary school teachers wear colourful clothing, like I present those identity signifiers in those scenarios when I don't in like professional or school scenarios. So I definitely have adapted even with this like intense consciousness I have of how I'm being led to do these things, right? And there is an oppressiveness to that, right?

Cressida: 44:08

You're curating your background.

Joshua: 44:10

The funny thing about working from home is you could turn off the camera, right? You could turn off your camera, and then no one really knows what you're doing. And I remember hearing about like some students who would basically like turn on the class and attend, but be in bed and like you know, sleeping, right? And not not that you ever do that. I'm not asking you to out yourself on that. But like, is that something that you think was happening during during work from home?

Hannah: 44:45

A thousand percent. And even in that alliance between students that always like exists outside of the professor relationship to some degree, like the private chat function on Zoom before they're like, hey, by the way, the professor can request a transcript of the like person-to-person communication in the Zoom call. As we were all learning the etiquette of that, I remember so much of that type of chatter between me and my like trusted confidants in the void. You're just like, oh, like I'm not actually here. Like, don't ask me to like talk in the group. Like, yes, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm not, I'm not actually here. I have friends who've taken showers during class and just listen to it in the shower. And certainly I've had friends who've slept, so 100%.

Joshua: 45:33

Yeah, and the ability to be like asleep is, you know, sometimes the prof will ask the person, anyways, especially if they don't have the network of support in the classroom. And then there's just silence, right? And everyone in the class knows like their person is there, like they're attending, but they're definitely not there, right? Like they have definitely left. They're either they've either fallen asleep or they have, you know, left to go take a shower or go do something else. So even that like feeling like you don't know what the other person is doing, right? And a very they could be doing something very private.

Hannah: 46:16

I think it's interesting how the paper is about sleep, but it's not at all the same way.

Cressida: 46:22

Like I'm having that problem with this whole project!

Hannah: 46:25

Yeah, yeah. Sleep is hard to do. We're not there for it, right? Like we're we're somewhere else when it's happening. And the only people that get to be there for it are people who are around us. Sleep is almost like this secret thing that happens between every other intimacy that we're willing to perform. So that being pushed into a space of observation with the way it's been weaponized, by weaponized is too negative of a word, but like used by powerful people to observe my slumber, that I'm so important, even when I'm not conscious. Yeah. It's like it's trying to pin a cloud. I don't know how to describe it. It's like the elusive secret thing not being said among all the things that are said.

Cressida: 47:11

One of the paradoxes of sleep and about trying to think about it is that you could say that when you're asleep, you're absent. I don't know if that's quite right, but you could say that. And so when we talk about sleep, we're talking about an absence. And so we end up talking about other things. But I sort of think that's right because the way that sleep is represented culturally, there's always something that it means that's not sleep. And I think that that's clear in the sort of the discussions about waking from bed. You know, your bed is to sleep, and yet, and yet.

Hannah: 47:45

Or this dichotomy of like sleep is absence of life. Like you're gone. Dude, I was dead last night. The language that we use to describe being there or being not there, but the way life sneaks into our sleep, even if we pretend it doesn't.

Cressida: 48:16

I think this is a huge tension running through everything that we're talking about. That on the one hand, we want sleep to be something, we want it to mean, whether we want it to mean culturally or we want it to mean for ourselves, we want it to be productive or useful to signify, but on the other hand, sleep is a checking out. But there's also other lots and lots of other ways of thinking about sleep as something, as an experience of some kind, whether for self or for others. And some of them I think are a little bit mixed up in the same logic. Like you can just accept that sleep is a waste of time, or you can try and cha-ching it.

Joshua: 48:56

Yeah.

Cressida: 48:57

You know, it's sort of the same thing.

Joshua: 48:58

Yeah.

Cressida: 48:59

But others of them are, I think, a bit more interesting that we really need changes of speed, we really need changes in consciousness. We can't sort of plow our way through 24-7 trying to be productive all the time without losing our minds, possibly, our health, possibly, but also something important about what it is to be human.

Joshua: 49:21

Yeah.

Cressida: 49:27

Tom's asleep.

Joshua: 49:28

Yeah. Tom, are you alright?

Cressida: 49:31

That's great. We really want to use that as the very end.

Joshua: 49:34

It's all right. Are you sleeping? Ah, Tom.

Joshua: 49:42

Next time on Sleep is the New Sex, we'll be talking about sleep and time, cultures of speed up and slowdown with our guest Sarah Sharma.

Cressida: 49:53

The series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Niisitapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudonoshonee, and Anishinabi, lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7 and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognise the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations. Our sound engineer is Tom Merklinger, who also wrote and performed our music. To find our first season, please see the link in the show notes, and for more information on this project, visit sleepisthenewsex.ca