Call for Chapters – Edited volume

The Cultural Life of Beds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Materiality, Bodies and Power

University of New England, Australia

For publication with an international publisher

The bed is one of the most familiar yet least examined objects in everyday life. We sleep in it, are born in it, recover in it, love in it, die in it, dream from it, and increasingly work from it. It is simultaneously private and public, intimate and political, domestic and institutional. Throughout literature, film, television, art, architecture, history, popular culture, medicine, and digital media, the bed repeatedly emerges as a space where bodies, identities, relationships, labour, care, surveillance, pleasure, illness, and resistance are negotiated.

Although scholarship has examined bedrooms, domesticity, intimacy, and material culture, the bed itself has rarely been treated as a central object of cultural analysis. Recent work in Bed Theory has begun to conceptualise the bed as a site of conditional care and anti-ableist world-building, inviting scholars to theorise with beds rather than merely about them. Building upon these emerging conversations, this edited collection argues that the bed occupies a unique position within cultural history as an object through which societies imagine normality, productivity, intimacy, citizenship, disability, sexuality, childhood, ageing, and death.

Rather than viewing the bed simply as furniture, this collection considers it as a cultural technology: an object that structures everyday life while simultaneously becoming a powerful narrative, political, and symbolic device.

The volume welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from scholars working across literary studies, film and television studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, disability studies, queer studies, architecture, design history, geography, anthropology, history, philosophy, religious studies, medical humanities, childhood studies, feminist studies, and environmental humanities.

The volume aims to develop a genuinely interdisciplinary intervention, moving beyond symbolic readings of the bed to examine how beds organise bodies, relationships, labour, care, memory, power, and everyday life across cultures, histories, and media.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Theorising the bed: Bed Theory, materiality, embodiment, and new conceptual approaches
• The cultural lives of beds: histories, biographies, and changing meanings across time
• Beds as objects: material culture, design, technology, and domestic infrastructures
• Beds as spaces: bedrooms, homes, architectures of intimacy, and domestic belonging
• Beds as infrastructures of care: illness, disability, healing, repair, and recovery
• Beds as medical technologies: hospitals, institutions, healthcare, and therapeutic environments
• Beds as sites of Beds of embodied difference: psychiatry, institutionalisation, neurodivergence, disability, crip theory, fat studies
• Beds across the life course: birth, childhood, ageing, dying, and memorialisation
• Beds of sleep and dreaming: consciousness, imagination, fantasy, and oneiric worlds
• Beds of rest: exhaustion, burnout, stillness, leisure, and the politics of doing nothing
• Beds of resistance: care, refusal, protest, activism, and radical rest
• Beds of labour: capitalism, productivity, domestic work, and the commodification of rest
• Digital beds: wellness culture, smart technologies, surveillance, sleep tracking, and mediated intimacy
• Beds of discipline: surveillance, confinement, governance, incarceration, barracks, dorms, and institutional power
• Beds in transit: hotels, motels, hospitality, tourism, migration, displacement, and temporary dwelling
• Beds without homes: homelessness, housing precarity, poverty, refugee experiences, sleeping in public
• Beds of intimacy: love, desire, sexuality, kinship, family, and queer domesticities
• Gendering the bed: masculinity, femininity, motherhood, fatherhood, care, and reproductive labour
• Children's beds: bedtime, play, imagination, education, and becoming
• Luxury beds: class, consumption, aspiration, comfort, and domestic economies
• Colonising the bed: race, empire, colonial domesticity, and decolonising spaces of rest
• Sacred beds: religion, ritual, spirituality, pilgrimage, and ceremonial sleep
• Ecological beds: environmental humanities, climate, ecology, sustainability, and more-than-human rest
• Imagining beds otherwise: utopian, dystopian, speculative, and posthuman futures of rest and care
• Beds of belonging: privacy, vulnerability, security, comfort, refuge, and home
• Beds in time: waiting, memory, nostalgia, temporality, atmosphere, and affect
• Beds across cultures: comparative, historical, transnational, and global sleeping practices
• Beds on screen and page: literature, film, television, visual art, performance, photography, music, comics, animation, gaming, and digital cultures
• Haunted beds: horror, ghosts, Gothic, folklore, fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, the uncanny, spectral domesticity
• Beds in public: protest, occupation, performance, activism, spectacle, and collective life
• The bed as threshold: between life and death, waking and dreaming, illness and health, childhood and adulthood
• The politics of horizontality: bodies that lie down, refuse, recover, or resist
• Beds that move: mobility, transport, travel, exile, and portable domesticity
• Beds that remember: archives, memory, inheritance, and family histories
• Beds that witness: intimacy, violence, trauma, testimony, and survival
• Beds that care: dependency, reciprocity, maintenance, and everyday ethics
• Beds that govern: power, discipline, surveillance, and social regulation

Submission Guidelines

Please submit:

• an abstract of 250–300 words
• a short biography of 100 words

Abstract submissions should be made via the online submission form:

Qualtrics Submission Form:
https://unesurveys.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8pNwmtqXACsjUN0

Selected contributors will be invited to submit chapters of approximately 6500 words, including references (Chicago author-date).

All chapters will undergo editorial review prior to inclusion in the manuscript.

Timeline

Abstract submissions: 1 December 2027
Notification of acceptance: end January 2028
First chapter drafts due: June 2028
Peer review and revisions: August 2028
Final chapters due: November 2028 

Queries and Abstracts

For enquiries, please contact: jo.coghlan@une.edu.au at the University of New England, Australia