The Friends of the University of Alberta present Raise The Bar
with Dr. Cressida Heyes
Sleep is the New Sex?
Sleep is always in the news, often under the headline that we are experiencing a “sleep crisis.” What is this crisis, and where did it come from? Why are we so anxious about sleep? In this short talk I’ll offer some answers to these questions drawn from my research in cultural politics. Come along and learn a little bit about the history of sleep, the preoccupation with giving advice to new mothers, the “sleep gaps” in gender and race, or why powerful men like to pretend they never sleep.
Blue Chair
9624 – 76 Avenue NW
Tue, Jun 10, 2025
5:00 PM Doors Open
6:00 PM Speaker + Q&A
Ticket includes 1 drink (beer, house wine, non-alcoholic)
Drinks Menu at The Blue Chair Cafe

Cressida Heyes is the author of three monographs, most recently Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 David Easton Award from the American Political Science Association, and finalist for the North American Social for Social Philosophy Book Award. The book argues that “experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. At the same time, “the personal is political,” and one’s own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. Anaesthetics of Existence reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one’s life a work of art, Heyes’ “anaesthetics of existence” describes antiprojects that are tacitly excluded from life—but should be brought back in. Drawing on critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and analyzes phenomena that press against those edges. Essays on sexual violence against unconscious victims, the temporality of drug use, and childbirth as a limit-experience build a politics of experience while showcasing Heyes’ philosophical method.
Dr. Heyes is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project called “Sleep is the New Sex,” which extends and moves beyond the work in Anaesthetics, to examine how representations of sleep are implicated with cultural anxieties and political struggles around gender, sexuality, work, leisure, and rest.
Raise The Bar is a program designed by The Friends of the University of Alberta to provide engaging learning opportunities delivered by U of A researchers in a causal setting – like a bar. We’re raising the bar on the way people consume content!