Thinking with the Sleeping Body: A Feminist Reimagination of Human–Earth Relations

In times of Earthly crises, habituated Euro-Western vocabularies and imaginaries—dichotomist and human-centric—need to be questioned, and radically different ones developed.* Thinking with the Sleeping Body: A Feminist Reimagination of Human-Earth Relations* employs the sleeping body as a theoretically informed and politically motivated figure to open novel imaginaries and relationalities—ones that are not based on wakeful rationality, or the possessive quest for controlling and managing everything. The book does not explore the sleeping body as such but is interested in its potential to generate an intellectual space for rethinking and experimenting with Earthly relations creatively and critically, with the aim of paving the way for more caring relations.

Valtonen draws from feminist new materialist and post-humanist scholarship, and employs relational feminist methodologies for studying multispecies life. Based on long-term (auto)ethnographic fieldwork in the Northern context, the book discusses the aerial, vulnerable, and temporal relations that are articulated through a breathing body, a (dis)connecting sleeping body, and a sleeping body that slows down. The sleeping body can thus also be seen as a rebellious body in the world of stories occupied by wakeful heroic-masculine protagonists. Ultimately, Valtonen argues, creative thinking on the sleeping body opens up new spaces for imagining and enacting more caring, and more-than-human, relations with a fragile Earth.