Bed Theory: Uncovering Disabled Perspectives in Labour Theory

This project draws on a long and largely un-named tradition of recumbent theorising, from Marcel Proust's bedbound writing of In Search of Lost Time, through Franz Kafka's rendering of the bed as a site of bodily
transformation in The Metamorphosis, to Frida Kahlo's portrayal of the bed as both a heaven and a cage. Virginia
Woolf, in "On Being Ill", locates the bed as a site of recumbent theorising, describing how in shifting our
perspective, the bed releases our capacity for creative and critical thought. This framing is brought to life again in
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's (2018: 9) acknowledgement in Care Work of her "decolonial, queer, disabled
bed space of wild disabled femme of color dreams."
My work builds on this tradition to centre the bed as a space where bodies in states of vulnerability go to expand
their political imagination. I put forward the concept of "bed theory" to explore how recumbent theorising transforms
our relationship to the given world, pushing us to reconsider what we understand to be of value at work, in the
academy, and at home. Through the concept of bed theory, I make space for getting intimate with ourselves and
each other, disrupting hierarchies of productivity, intellect, and properness, and calling for the inclusion of our
impractical and sensuous selves in our politics and writing. In this space, we might come to identify the experience
of nodding off at work as labour theory. We might recognise the widespread memes documenting a desire to
become a well-fed cat living rent-free in a warm home as labour-theoretical texts.
This project's primary critical intervention is an explicit reconceptualization of the bed as a site for theorising.
Through interdisciplinary synthesis, I will uncover the forms of theorising that emerge from the increasingly
generalised condition of being bed-bound (bound, both in the sense of being tied to, and directed towards). This
condition, I argue, results from the growing attritions of chronic illness and exhaustion under neoliberalism and,
therefore, affects us all to varying degrees. Consequently, my project will involve a critical engagement with the
labour of theorising and the exclusions that result from precarious academic employment practices. In addition, by
exploring the various forms of labour that take place in bed, I will reframe established understandings of work as a
solely productive activity necessarily carried out by healthy people in workplaces. As such, this project contributes
to the long tradition of diversifying the interests and goals of Marxist theory, including Queer Marxism (Floyd, 2009),
Black Marxism (Robinson, 1983), Decolonial Marxism (Rodney, 2022 ) and Marxist Feminism (Davis, 1981), by
advocating a further innovation from a critically disabled and queer perspective. In doing so, it makes way for
meaningfully including disability in labour politics, an inclusion that feels piercingly urgent following the recent UK
government announcement that disabled people will be made to work from home or face losing their benefits
(Quinn, 2023).To do this work, my study draws on the field of Crip theory, a branch of disability studies informed by queer theory's
subversive reclamation of derogatory language. Crip theory embraces embodied divergence and debilitation as
potentially world-building and critically fruitful (McRuer, 2006; Kafer, 2013). As such, it offers the tools for breathing
life into the bed, the sick site par excellence, as a space that holds disabled potentiality. "Cripping" (Sandahl, 2003)
key texts in the fields of labour theory, queer theory and Black radicalism, I put these into conversation with their
vernacular counterparts: zines, memes, video games, and art made by exhausted people from their beds. In doing
so, I produce a new space from which to re-evaluate the embodied hierarchies of intellect and labour already
challenged in these fields.