Recent work such as Rest is Resistance (2022) by Tricia Hersey and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has begun to articulate rest as a necessary refusal of extractive capitalist demands. Building on these interventions, this panel situates rest not as inactivity or “laziness” but as a politically charged condition shaped by histories of racial capitalism and colonialism. From initial conceptions of primitive accumulation which erode barriers between public life and sensuous, private life where rest could occur, to the introduction of labor-power as a commodity that demands renewal, capital consistently degrades the capacity for true rest. The panel thus places scholarly analysis in dialogue with activist frameworks that position resistance to productivity as central to justice.

At MLA, four papers will examine rest and its limits by focusing upon literary and cultural texts post 1800. Charlotte Sussman examines sleep deprivation as a form of violence within the plantation economy as represented in The History of Mary Prince (1831). Sussman shows how the denial of sleep functions as a technique of extraction while tracing how communal rest opens possibilities for resistance within conditions of enslavement. Also beginning with 19th-century literature, but extending into contemporary contexts, Pelin Kivrak reads Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) alongside discussions of large language models to theorize refusal as a form of rest within language itself. By focusing on Bartleby’s syntactically minimal yet disruptive phrase (“I would prefer not to”) Kivrak argues that linguistic hesitation interrupts the imperative to produce, offering a conceptual counterpoint to systems optimized for constant output.

Turning to queer-of-color and trans cultural theory to interrogate the racialized and gendered politics of rest, affect, and nonresponsiveness, Xine Yao’s “Pillow Princesses and Sleeping Beauties: A Crip of Colour Critique” analyzes Leslie Feinberg's classic working class trans novel Stone Butch Blues (1993) to discuss the gendering of queer hardness and emotional labour. Yao also draws on lived experiences of chronic illness, reframing states of inertia and unfeeling not as deficits but as necessary conditions of recovery and resistance to affective demands. Finally, Vanessa Holyoak’s “The Dream: Oneiric Time in Queer South/east Asian Cinema” defines dreamtime as alternative temporality in films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang. Through close analysis of Memoria (2022) and What Time Is It There? (2001), Holyoak argues that metaphorical dreamtimes proffer an escape from the isolation of modern productivist time regimes, constructing new relational possibilities for queer and postcolonial modes of being. Taken together, these papers promise to open conversation about how embodied deceleration and refusal challenge extractive systems.

“Introducing Critical Rest Studies” brings together scholars across a range of institutional contexts, career stages, and geographic locations. The panelists represent interdisciplinary expertise reflecting the cross-field nature of the session’s focus, bringing insights from crip-of-color critique, queer and trans studies, and lived experiences of chronic illness and disability. Their diverse perspectives are not supplemental but rather are central to the panel’s innovative exploration of the material, embodied, social, and political conditions that structure who is permitted rest.

The session will be organized into four 10-12 minute presentations–leaving room for thoughtful pauses within and between papers–followed by a minimum of 20 minutes of open discussion to encourage audience engagement and interdisciplinary exchange. Through collaboration, we aim to establish rest as a critical analytic for understanding the pressures of neoliberal productivity and the possibilities of feminist, anti-ableist, and decolonial resistance.