The ‘Negotiated Night’: An Embodied Conceptual Framework for the Sociological Study of Sleep

Abstract

Sleep is essential for our health and wellbeing but it has, historically, been the subject of little sociological study. Yet sleep is not, as common sense would have us believe, ‘asocial inaction’. Like our waking lives, it is a time of interaction. The sociology of sleep presently exists in a state similar to the early stages of development of the sociology of the body, waiting for something like Frank's (1991) typology of body action, which served as a heuristic guide through which action and its multifaceted components could be understood. This paper argues that one productive analytical framework is to adapt Watson's (2000) ‘male body schema’ for the sociological investigation of sleep. This revolves around four interrelated forms of embodiment: normative (opinions and perceptions about healthy sleep behaviour); pragmatic (‘normal’ as related to social role); experiential (feelings related to sleep); and visceral (the biological body and sleep). The possibilities this model provides for the sociology of sleep is illustrated in the paper through the analysis of a case study of sleep negotiation between a couple.