Cressida Heyes: “Go The F*ck to Sleep and Other Stories: a political theorist reads advice to parents”

Cressida Heyes: “Go The F*ck to Sleep and Other Stories: a political theorist reads advice to parents”

Categories: Lectures and Seminars | Intended for

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM | Add to calendar

2017 Dunton Tower

1125 Colonel By Dr, Ottawa, ON

Contact Information

Alexis Shotwell, 8032, Alexis.Shotwell@Carleton.ca

Registration

No registration required.

Cost

Free

About this Event

Host Organization: Sociology and Anthropology

Go The F*ck to Sleep and Other Stories: a political theorist reads advice to parents

Going to sleep is a transitional event, a bodily crossing-over from consciousness to unconsciousness that must be learned and is often fraught. In particular, encouraging or insisting that one’s child go to sleep at the right time, in the right place, and with the right kinds of rituals or assistance has become a marker of good parenting. This presentation advances and defends the thesis that there are fashions in advice to parents on children’s sleep that mirror a larger political milieu as much as they reflect evidence-based medicine. In particular, the way that attachment and independence are represented through advice to mothers and fathers track larger political anxieties about the citizen and the state. Through a brief reading of 1980s Ferberizing and “cry it out,” through attachment parenting and its more palatable variants, to the ironic despair of the twenty-first century plea Go The F*ck to Sleep, I argue that the political zeitgeist is refracted and reproduced through ideologies of rest. When so much of neoliberal anxiety about citizen independence and productivity centres on our capacity to work, using the way we foster the transition to sleep as a site of biopolitical control is a fascinating paradox that is mirrored in other attitudes to rest, leisure, and other potential sites of withdrawal from political life.

Co-sponsored by the Carleton University Department of Sociology & Anthropology; The Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies and the Joint Chair in Women's Studies, Carleton University and University of Ottawa.