Episode 09: Sleepy stereotypes
In this episode: Danielle Wong joins Joshua and Cressida to talk about the “Sleepy Asians” meme of Tumblr fame. What’s behind the question “why do Asians sleep in public?” and what made it a sensational meme with its own creepshots? (10:59). How can we think from cultures of sleep, anti-Asian racism, and patterns of labour migration to get us to photos of Asian people in western multicultural cities asleep in the library or on the train?! How are sleep practices underscored by racial logics? (16:37). We all discuss “techno-orientalism” (30:48), and anti-Asian stereotypes connected to tech, “model minorities," and the “bamboo ceiling” (36:38). Increasingly we work globally and work is outsourced to people in other timezones. Joshua asks Danielle how we should think about sleep as “transnational” (41:06). And what is the disruptive potential of sleep? (45:29)
Mentioned in this episode: Danielle Wong, “Sleepy Asians,” Representations 168, 2024; Bernd Hagemann, Sleeping Chinese (2010); Eric Leleu, Day Dreamers (2015); Brigitte Steger, anthropologist of sleep in Japan; Ralph Jennings, “Why Asians Sleep in Public: Two Answers from Taiwan,” Forbes Asia, October 27 2015; Edward Said, Orientalism (1978); Matthew Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses (2012); Raka Shome, “Thinking Through the Diaspora: Call Centers, India, and a New Politics of Hybridity” (2006); Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, “The Art of Sleep;” Jean Ma, At the Edges of Sleep (2022); Franny Nudelman, Fighting Sleep (2019). Thumbnail is the Tumblr icon.
Transcript
Cressida: 00:00
Right at the end of the article, you say, Dn I think you're trying to make the end a bit more positive.
Danielle: 00:06
Everybody tries to say something cheery at the end. I feel like, do you know, as a side note, that's sort of like an academic tendency, right? Don't you think it's that like, oh, I can't just leave it here, but which we could because I that's the point of the essay. When I already said what I needed to say. But and yet you feel, yeah, there's often these impulses or compulsion, at least. Yes.
Cressida: 00:28
Well, you see, I'm British, so I try to end on the very most cynical, pessimistic note I can possibly think of.
Danielle: 00:33
I really appreciate that. I think you know what? You know what? It makes me want to rewrite the ending of a lot of my work, the codas, whatever, the conclusions, and end with cynicism because the kind of toxic positivity by which we end up all our articles. This is why I can't reread my work.
Cressida: 01:11
Hello and welcome to Sleep is the New Sex. Today we're talking to Danielle Wong about a short article she recently published that's called, very simply, and this is in scare quotes, that's important, "Sleepy Asians." So, what I love about this piece and about our conversation with Danielle is that she managed to take a defunct meme that's about 10 plus years old, and take this little piece of sleep culture and start talking about all kinds of really complicated racial histories, cultural codes that bring sleep and specifically anti-Asian racism together. And so you just start from one series of weird images on Tumblr and it unspools into a whole conversation.
Joshua: 02:01
Yeah, I love this as a window to starting this larger conversation about the way sleep and race and racism and histories of race interact. I was really surprised with where it went, but I love that. Yeah, we start with this very tangible example and then it unravels from there.
Cressida: 02:23
Let's meet Danielle.
Danielle: 02:25
I'm really happy to be here. I'm Danielle Wong. I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Languages at the University of British Columbia. Ah, I also teach in the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies program here on campus. And my teaching and my research mainly consider the intersections of race, new media, and empire. And I have a very vocal elderly cat, and that's one of the reasons why I'm recording from my office today.
Cressida: 02:57
I identify. I have a dog that has an exceptionally loud bark, and just every now and then I'm like, oh, he's appeared. Has he appeared on the podcast? So far, no.
Danielle: 03:06
Someone making a feature.
Cressida: 03:08
Yeah, exactly. So your work first came to my attention because you published this very short but very chewy article that's just called "Sleepy Asians" last year. And I love it. I think it's really fascinating. And I wanted to sort of see if we could get into it. So so that piece starts from a meme, which is largely now defunct. I tried to go through the internet and look for examples of the things that you were talking about, and most of them have been taken down. But, the meme is pictures of Asian people sleeping in public. So can you tell us about that meme and what got you interested in it?
Danielle: 03:49
Yeah, the kind of defunct aspect of it is something I was trying to grapple with in revisiting the meme because I first encountered the meme as it was circulating. So 2015, I want to say, 2012, 2015, you know, about a decade ago. And this is during the time when Tumblr is still alive.
Cressida: 04:09
It feels very Tumblr-ish, actually. Yeah.
Danielle: 04:12
There is a Tumblr sensibility in terms of its visual grammars, but I think what poses an interesting challenge to folks who love Tumblr is that it's like explicit forms of racism, right, and breaching of our particular assumptions and values around a particular model of privacy gets disrupted, right, in this moment. My understanding of the reading of Tumblr is that in some ways it's a little bit of a sanctuary from there are pockets of Tumblr that are supposed to be sanctuary from the kind of overt, you know, misogynist, sexist spaces around this time. And part of my longer reading of this is that like, well, what this exposes is a particular the limits of a kind of liberal tradition of understanding privacy by which the kind of racialized other always exceeds or is outside of those protections. But yeah, I encountered it as they were proliferating. And actually, on a personal note, it reminded me of when I was an undergrad and a graduate student in Ontario, I would be constantly, you know, asked to move along by security guards because I myself was falling asleep at libraries because I was trying to study or do work. And Toronto Metropolitan University, where I did my undergrad, had a policy on not sleeping on campus.
Cressida: 05:31
Yeah.
Danielle: 05:32
And it's like a very thinly veiled, coded, right, policy that was basically interfacing with unhoused folks on campus. Yes. Right. Yes. So I think in those moments, I just didn't know what to make of that. I thought it, you know, it's this is just the policy the campus has. And so the student and the unhoused person are different, are different subjects that are being policed by this umbrella policy that kind of moves between those classed and race positions.
Cressida: 06:06
Didn't you once work as a security guard, moving people along who were sleeping in university libraries?
Joshua: 06:12
Yeah, this is one of those
Cressida: 06:14
We're harking back to your sordid past.
Joshua: 06:16
Going back into my yeah, my sordid past of being the the op as restless high schoolers used to call me.
Cressida: 06:24
The op?
Joshua: 06:25
The op, as in the opposition.
Cressida: 06:27
Wow.
Joshua: 06:27
Yeah. But yeah, so back when I was an op.
Cressida: 06:30
The op.
Joshua: 06:31
I was so like when Danielle was describing this, it was from the other side. I could definitely confirm that this was something that happened, and this wasn't just something that happened at the Toronto Metropolitan University, but this was something that it seems more widespread. I've worked in a few different campuses, and as I've said on this podcast previously, the sleeping person was one of the largest threats that you faced or were presented with as a security guard because your job is sort of to keep things moving and to keep spaces cleared, and as soon as someone falls asleep, they kind of become planted and they become a nuisance that you have to, you know, move out of the way. And Danielle does specifically say that this these policies about not sleeping in campus really start as being about the unhoused population. But as with most of these policies, you then get to select how you apply that in different contexts. Right. And it always is presented as this correct use of space and who is supposed to be in that space and who is not. But at the end of the day, it is a tool for moving people along and around.
Cressida: 07:58
Yeah. I while we were having the conversation, I was thinking about images of people sleeping in public. And because I've done a lot of research now on the cultural politics of sleep, I've seen a lot of pictures of people asleep. And you're right that I think by far the most common representation of people sleeping in public, and certainly what you'll find if you just Google image search is people who are hypothetically unhoused, right? Like the images representing them in that way. And mostly they're in public parks, on benches, sometimes on public transit, but there are also lots of pictures of sort of generic people sleeping in those public places. But, what Danielle is specifically interested in is in scare quotes, "Asians sleeping in public."
Joshua: 08:49
That's right.
Cressida: 08:50
And it's still the case, you know, that as soon as she started talking about it, I realized this that there are enduring collections of images of people sleeping in China or Japan. Those are the two particular national contexts that are curated by Western photographers. So at one point she mentions a German guy who I looked up and his name is Bernd Hagermann. And in 2010, he published a book called "Sleeping Chinese." I now, after the conversation, I can't say it without laughing. And in a very similar vein, there's a guy called Eric Leleu, who's French, who published in 2015, so this is contemporaneous with with the meme, published a book of images of people asleep that he had taken similarly during his time in China, that's called "Daydreamers." And so this is a bit of a genre even outside Tumblr. Yeah. And also you do see very sort of anthropological images of people sleeping in public in Japan, because in the literature, Japan is often represented as having a very distinctive sleep culture. And that seems to be true in interesting ways, and I think it's completely legitimate to do anthropology of Japan. But, it's just a bit unnervingly common to encounter pictures of Japanese people asleep on, especially on public transit or in their workplaces, used to illustrate some point about the cultural politics of sleep. So I'm really curious about how Danielle is going to describe this related genre of random Asian people in global north cities, so that's a bit different, who've been photographed by strangers.
Joshua: 10:31
Yeah. Danielle is trying to show how these seemingly silly or trivial threads of photos on Tumblr actually have a deep racial history. First, I guess there is like a naive response to them that takes the pictures at face value. But if you dig, there's a lot more going on.
Cressida: 11:02
I can imagine somebody looking at the you know, the idea of this article and saying, great question. Why do Asians sleep in public so much? And in fact, you cited a little article in Forbes Asia, which picks up on the same meme, and that is still online. So I was able to read that. And it in fact just tries to explain the presence of this meme by answering that question. And some of the things in it are they're not exactly wrong, right? So it talks about different cultures of sleep, the acceptability of napping and especially of public napping, different work practices, but it is written in this very naive voice of like, what we have to explain here is why Asians do sleep in public, not why people take photos of Asians sleeping in public and put them on Tumblr.
Danielle: 11:54
Why is it so sensational? Yes. What's more interesting is how it became sensational, right? Or as a kind of spectacle. And that article's, you know, silly, kind of funny to me because it takes very sincerely a racist without the other kind of critical lens of well, why are people gawking at, right? Or why are people taking photos of people you know doing their thing, right? In in different spaces. So I would say that there's an attempt at a cultural explanation of this memetic event or memetic series of images, but there's no kind of racial reading. Yes, yes. It goes to culture, which at times can essentialize, right? The Asians sleep like this. Well, you know, that's very broad, but you know, in particular, East Asians sleep like this because I'm recalling the Forbes article, you know, their cities are so densely populated that sleeping spaces are brushing up against, you know, clubs, discos, commercial areas, malls. Well, there are many parts of Canadian and American uh US cities that also we could say things like this, where it's noisy and whatnot. Or it's particular educational expectations or the way the schools are set up. Okay, sure, there might be some readings of institutions that might be helpful. I think this attempt to kind of explain through a kind of cultural or even ethnographic reading of sleep, where it can raise interesting aspects of how sleep is historically specific or so absolutely that I think that's really helpful. The attempt, though, to explain why it's so strange still kind of reproduces what you might call as a kind of techno-orientalist imaginary of the Asian body, which is still based on the kind of assumed fundamental differences between so-called East and Western cultures, which can get essentialist. And it also assumes what is good or bad sleep as a way of reading the question of Asian modernities. So there's no kind of historical reading that takes into account a transnational or even global account of imperialism, global neoliberalization, you know, why is it that Taiwan, like other so-called tiger economies, looks this way, right? The rapid industrialization or density of cities, there's no kind of you know, structural or historical reading of sleep and how we value different forms of sleep. Yes. So there's a kind of cultural attempt, but it's missing the asymmetries of global power, rapid industrialization or neoliberalization in in East Asia. And to me, that's more of a reading of empire. Yes.
Cressida: 14:46
I mean, also there's a big literature about different cultures of sleep, and Japan is a really popular example in among anthropologists because there does seem to be a genuinely different attitude to all sorts of things to do with sleep in Japan that is no less connected to the histories that you've just mentioned than it is anywhere else. But it seems very different to be talking about that than to be talking about pictures of people in New York or Boston or Toronto who are who are Asian people living in multicultural societies photographed by randos on the train. Like that, that's not the same conversation. Exactly.
Danielle: 15:23
Yes, and I think that conflation actually goes back to what that meme is doing. What I suggested was that there are particular anxieties, right, that are emerging around this time that probably continue now about you know shifting conditions of work, digitization, what it means to be in public at all, right, or or whether it means to be private at all, our impossibility of resting under communication technologies that make us more and more available to all forms of different kinds of work. So these fears get kind of displaced or projected onto these postures or figures of the other that then get conflated with the non-citizen, non-American. So I think that the move to go to Taiwan, for instance, is a telling move that explains the meme even further. That gives us a bit more of a sense of what's undergirding the kind of racial affects and anxieties that that give forth to the meme.
Cressida: 16:34
So the takeaway here for me is that race is not the same as culture or nation. And culture is of course not outside history. So different cultures have different practices of sleep because reasons, and we can trace what those reasons are, and that's doing history or doing cultural studies. So that anthropological work that I mentioned earlier isn't illegitimate, but we're talking here about what Danielle calls the spectacle of Asians sleeping in public in multi-ethnic societies where they're a marked minority. So the idea that there are quote unquote Asian and then also scare quotes Western modes of sleep seems to ignore all sorts of interesting contextual reasons for different sleep practices, and instead represents what Danielle calls an essentialist view of cultural difference. So a view that's less interested in tracing the evolution of culture or thinking about how it's it's always changing, always transforming, including moving forward into the future, and instead tends to think of it as static and fixed. Everybody's doing the same thing in this culture, they're following the cultural rules in an uncritical way. And so that essentialist view of culture is being represented here.
Joshua: 17:56
Yeah, and in academia, I guess, you could say we call that "lazy" as explanations.
Cressida: 18:04
I like that.
Joshua: 18:05
Yeah, it's a lazy explanation. It's like, oh, that's just the way things are, we don't need to dig underneath that any more. And so if we're trying to reject what I would call a lazy explanation for this phenomenon or the essentialist view, and really try to understand how the Western gaze has come to this fascination with sleeping Asian bodies, what would that explanation look like? Danielle accounts for these racial logics in scare quotes by talking first about the history of migrant labor.
Cressida: 18:38
Yeah, and I wanted to explain a couple of things that she references. The first is she uses the phrase "Yellow Peril," which is a racist expression that's used to describe anxiety among , we're gonna say in this context, settlers in Canada and the US in the kind of mid to late 1800s. So after the official end of chattel slavery in the United States, but while these sort of industrializing projects are still being undertaken in those countries, a lot of that work used Chinese men. So men who were invited to migrate to Canada or the United States without other family members. So that's a condition of their migration, to do manual labor in the industrializing global West. So the fear, the xenophobic fear, was that even as these migrants were essential to projects like in Canada, most famously the Pacific Railroad, they were also arriving in hordes, threatening Western cultures and whiteness itself. So Yellow Peril is a colour metaphor. And the idea that East Asia would overrun white settler cultures, not just through sheer numbers, although also I think through sheer numbers, but through a superior work ethic. A willingness to work for lower wages and so on created huge hostility to new Asian migrants that we see in this racist language.
Joshua: 20:10
Danielle also mentions the term "coolie," which , my partner is from Lethbridge. And so I was familiar with coulees as big mounds of dirt.
Cressida: 20:20
Oh, you mean like the geographical feature?
Joshua: 20:22
Yeah, the geographic feature, and I was surprised to learn. And maybe this is you know a win for society that I have not grown up with the coolies being a racial slur. But for our non-Lethbridge audience, coolies can also refer to a racial slur used to describe those Asian laborers, usually denoting a man who works for low wages as part of a large cohort of unskilled workers.
Cressida: 20:50
Yeah, the term coolie is familiar to me, but I would associate it with as being a racist term that would be used by much older British people and usually about Indian migrants.
Joshua: 21:02
Oh, really?
Cressida: 21:03
Yeah, it can it's often used to describe the way that Indian workers circulated within the once British Empire. But in this context, we're talking about conditions that were basically slavery across the imperial world until well into the 20th century. So indentured servitude of a of a kind that really is, I guess we don't have time to make the argument, but is really a continuation of slavery. So Danielle is going to tell us how this history ties in to Tumblr in the 20 teens.
Joshua: 21:38
Yeah.
Cressida: 21:48
You've partly answered this already, but on the podcast, we talk a lot about how sleep is always about time and space and culture. Sleep habits are cultural, and the way that we think about sleep, what we're calling the cultural politics of sleep is always about time and space. And all of that is in your article, but you've also introduced the idea that sleep can convey what you call racial logics. Can you just say a bit about what you mean?
Danielle: 22:15
Sure. So under particular settler colonial capitalist rationales, sleep is a property of the autonomous, self-possessing, agential individual. And that sets up a kind of subject, right, of the future. So sleep as a racializing capacity is a potential for family, wage labor, civility, proper education, right? Because so many of our anxieties about sleep are connected to those institutions. And those institutions come out of particular, come out of like the history of race, right? Yes, yes. Asian sleep, I guess I'm thinking about in my projects as specifically speaking to histories of migrant labor that's seen as cheap, efficient, and mechanizable. And therefore, like Asians, this idea, like this meme speaks to longer histories of the idea that Asians are efficient even in sleep, right?
Cressida: 23:14
Right, yeah.
Danielle: 23:15
Right? That they need less sleep, they don't feel discomfort, they you know don't feel pain to the same degree. This is like kind of the discourse around the 19th century, you know, Asiatic coolie, right? Is that you know they're cheap because they can work harder, longer, more efficient. And this is connected to sleep and rest, they don't feel discomfort, right? So in the digital age, I'm thinking about how these sets of images are connected to informational labor and our anxieties around mechanization, computation, and the changing of time and space. And those anxieties I read as being visualized with this meme onto a racial other that kind of embodies the scary or the deviant that make too clear how transactional our everyday realms are. And in some ways, by putting it onto this racial other, a stranger as you put it, like the stranger that you can capture on the bus, this in some ways puts into small relief broader anxieties about shifting labor relations under information capitalism. What counts as unhygienic, right? And we think about sleep hygiene.
Cressida: 24:26
"Sleep hygiene," yeah, yeah.
Danielle: 24:28
Yeah, what counts as unhygienic or in proper forms of rest to the point where sleep can even signal not respite, but disturbance, that actually ends up destabilizing traditions of liberal colonial and neoliberal promises that set up those demarcations in the first place. So degrees of rest, in this case, sleep, in relationship to arenas of work and leisure. And so what I mean is that sleep as a kind of racializing capacity, I think is what I'm trying to say with with Asian sleep in this moment.
Cressida: 25:01
Yeah, so so there's a lot in that answer. So we can we can say how you sleep says something about the kind of person that you are, and that includes a racialized kind of person, and also about the kind of person that you will become. So there's a sort of aspirational quality to it. But that these generic sort of the list form, right? Like the Tumbler form of just scrolling down multiple examples, seems to make these quote-unquote Asians sleeping in public seem interchangeable somehow. That these are generic kinds of people sleeping in generic sorts of spaces. And also in your answer is the suggestion that they're sort of they're catching some Z's so that they can then go back to their labor with maximum efficiency, so they can sort of hop in and out of sleep in a way that at one point you actually say is like sleep mode for a device. So, like you might shut down your laptop for 20 minutes and then reopen it when you get to work. So, this kind of hopping in and out of sleep is episodic and efficient in a really different way than putting your PJs on and going to bed at 11 o'clock for eight hours, right? Totally different kind of sleep.
Danielle: 26:18
Yes, exactly. Right, that the eight-hour sleep that's been constructed as the healthy form of sleep, that's not fulfilled, right, in the sleep mode, which is really just shutting down episodically in order to keep going. And that's a temporal aspect, but I think what we're talking about is also a spatial transgression. That is, that one can fall asleep on the spot, yes, and then continue where they left off. You know, part of the this meme constellation was someone kind of gawking at the fact that this Asian person could sleep and guard their belongings standing up on the train. Obviously, this person standing up and closing their eyes on the train could be any kind of you know state of the body.
Cressida: 27:01
Yeah, yeah,
Danielle: 27:01
But labeling it asleep or disturbing or funny sleep speaks to what's strange to the viewer of sleeping episodically as a kind of temporal aspect, but also the fact that you know the train is supposed to be a kind of transition between work and home, and yet you can sleep when you're not at home.
Cressida: 27:19
Yes, you can do it anywhere!
Danielle: 27:20
Yes, you can do it anywhere. And I guess how I'm connecting that to questions of shifting labor relations under digitization or what we might call like informational labor or knowledge work is that in some ways this bridges longer, older forms of Yellow Peril, right? Figurations of the coolie to maybe contemporary anxiety that everywhere is our workplace, right? That you could be streaming from your bedroom, you could be zooming in from your kitchen. In 2016, 2015, 2012, where these memes are proliferating. My sense is that this is a kind of burgeoning, at least intensifying anxiety about the blurring of work and rest and our kind of sanctity of the domestic space, which has always actually been a privilege for our particular class.
Cressida: 28:10
Yes, and we have another episode on working from bed that sort of draws both on a pandemic experience, but also on long histories of who has always worked from bed or who represents themselves as a very special individual because they get to work from bed. And of course, there's a sort of elaborate gender politics to the way that space is organized for people working from bed. And so, in a way, this is the converse, right? That this is sleeping in public, which is another theme that we've talked about quite a bit. So, like working from home is the opposite of sleeping, sleeping in public. And as you say, there's both time and space. And a third thing that you've mentioned is posture or comportment, because a lot of these images, insofar as I could find them or you describe them, are of people, you've said this, who are kind of slumped or standing up or have put their head down on their hands at a desk. And it's trying to capture a kind of golly gosh, surprise, that there's a certain kind of person who can sleep in any position. So you seem to be suggesting it's a way of saying here's a new world of sleep, but there are certain kinds of people who, because of their race, are more fitted for it.
Danielle: 29:21
In the longer version of this short article in my book, I'm thinking about race at the scale or the level of posture. So how one is racialized via posture and gesture. Because we often think about race in kind of simplistic ways at the level of identity, as background, as culture, and I guess very, very simple general ideas of race and racialization. But here's a moment where you can't really see faces, and sometimes the clothing or the environment is completely obscuring what the body actually looks like, and yet, and yet the meme is about sleepy Asians. I guess what I'm saying is that these impossible postures of rest, of sleep, whether it's standing up, sleeping on a hard sidewalk, or rigid or sitting but slumped over, reveal for us the ways in which, you know, there are particular comportments of sleep that have a history, right? The bed itself, how we occupy the bed, how we inhabit a space. That race kind of underscores the proper and the proprietary.
Cressida: 30:47
So now we're bringing the history up to date by thinking about how these legacies of racism persist, but also how they've morphed in the 21st century.
Joshua: 30:56
Yeah, and Danielle starts to use this term that I found fascinating called "techno-orientalism." And that's referring to how this has everything to do with technology and information capitalism. So let's go to that.
Danielle: 31:08
So, technoorientalism, as wonderful scholars in the field of Asian American studies have been thinking about for decades, can be largely defined as the representation of Asia and Asians in relationship to different emergent technologies. And so if we think about um Edward Said's theorization of Orientalism, which situates the so-called Oriental as backwards, pre-modern, within like frozen in antiquity, superstitious, right? In order to offset and produce a rational, modern, progressive West. Orientalism in the 21st century under information capitalism continues this kind of colonial project of building a Western identity in contrast to the so-called Orient, that this continues, but but via the hypermodern, the technological, in some ways, the kind of exceeding of what's properly human in terms of work, industry, and industriousness, depictions of Chinese labor as en masse, as interchangeable, inscrutable, that this already hints at forms of machine fantasies or machine anxieties, or you might even say anxieties of computation, right? The non-human element of automation or automized work.
Cressida: 32:46
Yeah, that's good. That's really helpful. Because I think really the maybe the thesis of this article actually is that sleep is now part of information capitalism. And that's my next question. Can you say what what you mean by that?
Danielle: 33:01
Attempting to think about how sleep and that circadian rhythms, both in the kind of biological, the way in terms of you know, homeostatic processes, diurnal patterns, circadian rhythms, all we see is a kind of science or as biological, as as the realm of hormone, right? As the cognitive, our rendered modes of datification are information themselves. That's made really apparent right around the sleepy Asian mimetic circulation. Because around the same time you see sleep tracking apps, wearable technology emerge on the market in a kind of serious way, where people are beginning to track their sleep and have sleep as a quantifiable and even calibratable realm of existence, right? That that you can optimize what you're not consciously doing at night. And also I'm thinking about how these apps or these wearable technologies then visualize, make as new media sleep, right? So you can share graphics of how well you slept, right? There's ways in which sleep as self-optimization also becomes interactive. I've seen people, you know, share their sleep metrics on TikTok, I've seen people share as a kind of like humorous TikToks, noises of their sleep, whether it's sleep talking or their partners' humorous behaviors during sleep or snoring. So there's a way in which sleep becomes a kind of new media in that sense that just speaks to the different modes of information economies, right? Where data becomes a mineable and exchangeable commodity.
Cressida: 34:50
Yeah, that seems exactly right. That the decade of the 20 teens is also the decade when sleep really enters the realm of tech. And sleep apps are the most obvious example of that. And this is the same time period as the meme that you're looking at circulates.
Joshua: 35:16
So there's a link between Western understandings of Asianness and new technologies that also creeps into the sleepy Asians meme.
Cressida: 35:25
Yeah, and there's another more contemporary, kind of commonplace stereotype that East Asian immigrants are model minorities. And that creates this really odd juxtaposition of Western racist anxiety that Asian workers are robotic and interchangeable, that they're somehow a mass, again, you know, but just a sort of new kind of undifferentiated group of workers, but also that they are unusually hardworking and great at tech. And so these stereotypes really come together in interesting ways. Maybe we can try and get a little bit closer to the connection between the meme itself and sleep as a part of information capitalism. So for that I pulled a quote out of your article. I'm gonna ask Joshua to read it.
Joshua: 36:19
Here's the quote: "the images on Reddit, Tumblr, and Facebook almost always capture Asians sleeping nearby or on laptops, computers, and mobile phones. The implication here is not only that these nappers operate like these technologies, but that the sleepy Asian is the technology. When Asians sleep on the internet, the sleep is not legible as the comfort or relaxation of human rest, but more akin to the way a laptop or mobile phone can enter sleep mode, regardless of the social setting."
Cressida: 36:53
Great. Thanks. So so, Danielle, what does it mean to say that the sleepy Asian is the technology?
Danielle: 36:60
That's a great question. So I think there are two ways that I'm thinking about the sleepy Asian as, you know, is the technology. And one, I think more obviously, is that it excavates Orientalist and then techno-orientalist imaginaries of the not quite human body, you know, by which the sleepy Asian who's actually kind of a lot of the images almost blended into the desk that they're sleeping on, blended into the the technologies of work. In that sense, the subject and object are blurred, the sleepy Asian is the environment as much as it is like the focus of the image. And I think the second part of this speaks to our earlier question about sleep and information capitalism. Because, well, what's specific about the Asianness of the sleepy Asian meme? Specifically, I'm thinking about how the story of the early Web 2.0 is marked by a particular figure of success on YouTube, on blogs, fashion blogging. So one question that emerges before this is like, why are Asians so quote successful on the internet? How do they garner such virality? And you see this in the 2010s, right? Also, but there is a particular, if you will, a model minority success story around how the internet was supposed to break the so-called bamboo ceiling.
Cressida: 38:30
I've never heard that one!
Danielle: 38:31
I know it's a really annoying term. Publications around this time are like, yes, Asian diasporic or Asian American, you know, social media producers are breaking the bamboo ceiling, and the internet is, you know, democratizing representation, right? And it's decentralizing. Then of course, I think by now we're quite suspicious of this. But there was a moment whereby the promises of self-optimization, like by gadgets and apps and so on and so forth, and customizability, speak to a larger promise of self-optimization that the information age gives forth to possibilities of pulling up oneself via a savvy and know-how of technology, because this is for everyone, quote unquote, right? And that the Asian figure or the Asian American in this case represents a kind of racial story, promise of customizability, know-how, and somewhat DIY sensibilities of using technology.
Joshua: 39:41
We've really gotten a lot of mileage out of a dead meme.
Cressida: 39:45
Yeah, it offers a great way in, I think, to how the history of anti-Asian racism is tied in with sleep and work in the cultures that we live in, which are in some ways post-colonial and are definitely multi-ethnic.
Joshua: 40:00
Yeah, and we've talked a lot too about how this racist language has changed from prejudices about migrant labor through techno-orientalism through to information capitalism. At the end, I asked Danielle about how new strategies of global capitalism relate to transnational sleep.
Danielle: 40:17
In terms of the transnational potential of thinking collectively about disruptive sleep, I think about how transnational actually the localization and regionalization of our sleep is. I'm thinking about folks like Matthew Wolf-Meyer, who writes about how the normalization, right? the solidification of particular patterns of sleeping and waking in the US really come out around the same time as service industries are being outsourced, particularly to Asian labor in the global south, in the service of information economy. So thinking about how outsourcing disrupts the sense of time for that labor. And Raka Shome, for instance, writes about call center work in India. Part of the training, not only is it a kind of racial voice, cultural training in -American sounding voices, names, references, sports, right? But also is about a training in a sense of time. So that they need to live in a different time zone. So where it might be normally where people are expected to sleep in their time zone, their families might be sleeping at home. And in the US, it's morning time or it's afternoon time, it's where people are coming home from work. So the there's a kind of already transnational aspect of the violences of the disruption of sleep. And so that for me emphasizes more a need for a kind of transnational global diasporic reading of disruptive sleep as a critique. So there's a there's also a kind of like specificity to time zone and its locales that I'm thinking about. But in the book, I have a chapter on sleep where I think about uh this art duo called Young- Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and they're based in the US and in South Korea. And they have this video, I guess video art work called The Art of Sleep, which follows the speaker through a night of insomnia. In the middle of the night where a dog is barking, unlocated, right? We don't know where this is kind of a deracinated, seemingly unlocated, dislocated text, textual speaker. And in the kind of ramblings of this insomniac, they go on to muse about global debt, the US occupation of Korea, right? There's so for me that inspires me to think about like insomnia as a kind of transnational temporal way of meeting. In the artwork that's meditating on not being able to sleep, there's a kind of global consciousness, right? A global solidarity. And so, in terms of the artistic performance of insomnia or meditations on insomnia, I wonder if it can become a kind of analytic or heuristic to kind of think through staying awake for others, right? So if we recognize that these patterns of sleep and waking are so much tethered to our realities here, and what we've outsourced as work, perhaps this gives us a critique of labor and their dynamics and relations. But there's also quite like explicitly people working on transnational movements, like sit-ins, like a protest of the Vietnam War, as we've referenced, Black liberation movements after police shootings of folks like George Floyd, where people did sleep-ins or die-ins in different countries. So, in that sense, there is a kind of transnational aspect already to taking on postures of sleep.
Cressida: 44:03
So, right at the end of the article, Danielle says that maybe representations or practices of sleep could do more than just reinforce stereotypes. And she has a quote. Do you want to read it?
Joshua: 44:15
I'd love to. Here it is. "And yet, the sleepy Asian body that makes neoliberal capitalism all too apparent also affects something like disruption. These postures may even visually conjure a global history of lions or sleep-ins, in which performances of inertness, protest, imperial, settler colonial, and capitalist violence, as seen during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the 1960s, in AIDS organizing in the 1980s, and in protests across the US in 2020 after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police. Performing sleep or the disruption of slumber has also been a mode of critique for Asian artists, including Tehching Hs ieh, Sakiko Yamaoka and Christine Sun Kim. Indeed, as Jean Ma suggests in 'At the Edges of Sleep, Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators,' which examine sleep in film as both moving image and as audience and experience, a collective politics of sleep can help us abandon the fiction of self-sufficiency and autonomy and acknowledgement of vulnerability and interdependence."
Cressida: 45:20
Let's listen.
Cressida: 45:22
Maybe there's some disruptive potential here. I mean, in a way, I think your article is the disruptive potential, right? Because you've taken a meme that some dude in Forbes, Forbes Asia wrote, like, yes, why do Asians sleep in public so much? And you were like, well, let me just provide you with an alternative way of thinking about this meme. And so that's disruptive potential. So, you know, one way of thinking about this is there's, of course, so much interest in the effects of overwork. So, since the the decade in which this meme circulated, I think partly because of the pandemic in the middle, there's a lot more interest in quiet quitting or in the politics of refusal, in in refusing workism. So the idea that work should define you as a person and be the centerpiece of your life. So, you know, we might say sleeping in public is a small act of resistance to that, no matter who you are. But a bit more interesting is what you say, where you hope that it might be collective. So you mention public sleeping, I think, and we've talked in other episodes about encampments and sleep-ins. And I don't know if you've read this book, but you probably can't see it. There's a little book called "Fighting Sleep" by the awesomely named Franny Nudelman.
Danielle: 46:38
Yeah, I have read it.
Cressida: 46:39
Okay. Your article made me go back to that book and just think about all of the anti-Vietnam war activism that she talks about, because I think that that's a really interesting way of connecting political resistance and sleep and indirectly Asian-ness as well, right? Because of the way that it's implicated with this colonial war. But also that you mentioned some artists, you mentioned Jean Ma's book. Are there some examples here or some things specifics that you could say about disrupting sleeping in public or other aspects of the meme?
Danielle: 47:15
Sure. I'll just say very briefly that you prompted me also to think about what's happened since this meme. And my extension of this work is considering sleep streaming, which emerges during COVID. So, in some ways, it's a flip side to what you're saying about quiet quitting, our kind of like growing consciousness of overworking, our resistance to discourses of productivity and working from home that just got more intensified for not only academics, but folks, you know, like truck drivers who are then starting to get monitored, like wearable technology that employers could track if they're falling asleep on the road, you know. So we see these kind of bursting out during COVID. So it in some ways there's a kind of flip side to our growing consciousness that this is just not right, of our resistance to overwork, and yet the kind of cap the systems of capture that make us work or have us work or compel us to work or encourage us, like ASMR even being lulled into work, right? All that is booming right around COVID because we're at home, we're on our laptops so much, we're putting on things in the background as we work. And then we have sleep streaming as a way to monetize the disruption of sleep. So there's a way by which that it disrupted sleep. It's a kind of flip side of disruptive sleep, basically monetizing and gamifying sleep where viewers or fans could trigger certain technology software to wake up this the sleeper. So, you know, when we think about Twitch, the site of the bedroom is particularly gendered for who streams from the bedroom and what kind of content and how folks get around Twitch's rules around sex work or anything that's seen as quote pornographic. And so there's a particular way that the bedroom on Twitch is registered, registers to the viewer, fan, if you will. But in sleep streaming, which are mainly men who have people disturb their sleep, and usually the disruptions are very sexist sayings, or if you unfortunately read the chat as I did, watching a couple hours of these, more than a few hours of these, is very sexist, very violent, references sexual violence as a way to wake up the men. So there's a lot to say about gender and sleep and the shift to different modalities of communal slumber media, sleep media. So Jean Ma thinks about at the edges of sleep, she's thinking about a spectatorial history, an experience of sleep, depictions of sleep in film, but also sleeping audiences. The seeming loss of the formal dark theater where we all sit together in the dark and watch something to computer technologies, laptops, a lot of people just watching on their mobile phones, in bed, on the bus, or that question of communal sleep and dozing off as you're watching something kind of shifts. Like there are virtual communities that you're falling asleep with, and there's some interesting questions about what that means for the common or the communal experience. One thing I'm thinking about really like tangibly is in Vancouver, while I was writing this essay and part of my book, I was part of a movement called Stop the Sweeps Downtown East Side, which involved a group of volunteers and organizers who are protesting, trying to resist the city via the police's displacement of unhoused people from encampments, tents in the downtown east side. So there's like a move to push a lot of folks elsewhere and using city staff to kind of just like take their stuff and put them in garbage bins, really, really dehumanizing stuff. I participated as a legal observer. So a part of legal observation was being awake when the city would do this, right? Right. And part of the disruption of people's sleep, particularly of poor folks' sleep, of unhoused people's sleep, is to do it when they're when it's not during business hours. Yes, yes. And so if this is how these regimes work and how policing and carceral systems work, then I think organizers and people involved were thinking, you know, in some ways I see this like a sharing sleep. Like I will give up a certain time of sleep so I can get there early enough, and then I'm gonna go home and nap, and someone else is gonna come. Right. So there's ways by which we could see this as, you know, redistributing the hours of sleep. Because it assumes the stages of law, police specifically, or security guards, assume that that the collective that there are hours to the collective that we don't come out in force at this time because of the kind of private privatization, I guess, of sleep that occurs from these hours. Yeah.
Joshua: 52:06
And that's all for today. Thanks for listening to Sleep is the New Sex. Tune in in two weeks for another episode. In the meantime, you can always find us on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cressida: 52:18
Or on our website.ca, that's C A friends, for Canada, which also includes show notes linking to everything that we've mentioned today.
Cressida: 52:32
This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Niisitapii, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudanosonee, and Anishinabe, 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 recognize 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.