Authored by Danielle Drees, the upcoming release from University of Minnesota Press examines sleep and sleeplessness as embodiments of core feminist concerns.
Key takeaways:
- Sleep with Spectators: Feminist Performance and Practice by Danielle Drees will be published by University of Minnesota Press on September 8, 2026.
- The book analyzes sleep and sleeplessness through the lens of theater and performance art, presenting rest as a tool for care and interdependence.
- Case studies include works by Sarah Kane, María Irene Fornés, and Regina José Galindo to critique inequalities rooted in gender, race, and class.
A new book, Sleep with Spectators: Feminist Performance and Practice, explores how artists and thinkers utilize sleep as a radical counter to the exhaustion of confronting inequality. Published by University of Minnesota Press, the book by Danielle Drees will be available on September 8, 2026.
Centering creative work on the restorative practice of sleep, the book offers a counterhistory of feminism. It positions sleep as a tool for imagining new ways of living that prioritize rest, care, and interdependence.
Taking performance as a means of perceiving private and unconscious aspects of daily life, Drees draws from opera, plays, and avant-garde theater. The book finds instances of sleep and sleeplessness as novel embodiments of core feminist concerns.
Among the subjects explored are Sarah Kane’s free verse text 4.48 Psychosis; María Irene Fornés’s queer drama Enter THE NIGHT; and Regina José Galindo’s America’s Family Prison, in which Galindo, her partner, and their baby spent 24 hours in a “family-sized” cell rented from a private prison outfitter.
The book engages international archival material through the lenses of Marxist feminism, trans and queer studies, and disability studies to illuminate how sleep performances reveal and critique inequalities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability.
“In her brilliant new book, Danielle Drees illuminates the various ways that sleep permeates the world of contemporary theater and performance. Sleep and sleeplessness, she argues, reveal the stress points of culture, limning fault lines of precarity,” says Jean E. Howard, faculty member at Columbia University, in a release.
Drees is a marsted curatorial fellow at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Signs, Frontiers, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, and TDR: The Drama Review.
