Full Description
Americans spend billions of dollars every year on drugs, therapy, and other remedies trying to get a good nights sleep. Anxieties about not getting enough sleep and the impact of sleeplessness on productivity, health, and happiness pervade medical opinion, the workplace, and popular culture. In The Slumbering Masses, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer addresses the phenomenon of sleep and sleeplessness in the United States, tracing the influence of medicine and industrial capitalism on the sleeping habits of Americans from the nineteenth century to the present. Before the introduction of factory shift work, Americans enjoyed a range of sleeping practices, most commonly two nightly periods of rest supplemented by daytime naps. The new sleeping regimen-eight uninterrupted hours of sleep at night-led to the pathologization of other ways of sleeping. Arguing that the current model of sleep is rooted not in biology but in industrial capitalisms relentless need for productivity, The Slumbering Masses examines so-called Z-drugs that promote sleep, the use of both legal and illicit stimulants to combat sleepiness, and the contemporary politics of time. Wolf-Meyer concludes by exploring the extremes of sleep, from cases of perpetual sleeplessness and the use of the sleepwalking defense in criminal courts to military experiments with ultra-short periods of sleep. Drawing on untapped archival sources and long-term ethnographic research with people who both experience and treat sleep abnormalities, Wolf-Meyer analyzes and sharply critiques how sleep and its supposed disorders are understood and treated. By recognizing the variety and limits of sleep, he contends, we can establish more flexible expectations about sleep and, ultimately, subvert the damage of sleep pathology and industrial control on our lives.
Contents
Contents
Abbreviations
Preface: Sleep at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
Introduction: From the Lone Sleeper to the Slumbering Masses
Part I. Sleeping, Past and Present
1. The Rise of American Sleep Medicine: Diagnosing (and Misdiagnosing) Sleep
2. The Protestant Origins of American Sleep
3. Sleeping and Not Sleeping in the Clinic: How Medicine Is Remaking Biology
and Society
Part II. Cultures of Sleep
4. Desiring a Good Night's Sleep: Order and Disorder in Everyday Life
5. Before We Fall Asleep: Children's Sleep and the Rise of the Solitary Sleeper
6. Pharmaceuticals and the Making of Modern Bodies and Rhythms
7. Early to Rise: Creating Well-Rested American Workers
8. Chemical Consciousness
9. Sleeping on the Job: From Siestas to Workplace Naps
10. Take Back Your Time: Activism and Overworked Americans
Part III. The Limits of Sleep
11. Unconsciousness Criminality: Sleepwalking Murders, Drowsy Driving,
and the Vigilance of the Law
12. The Extremes of Sleep: War, Sports, and Science
Conclusion: The Futures of Sleep
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
