Guest Post - Cressida Heyes: Sleep is the New Sex
Cressida J. Heyes, author of Anaesthetics of Existence (Duke UP, 2020) and Professor and HM Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, shares from their experience of making a feminist podcast, Sleep is the New Sex, which will launch its second season this Fall 2026.
I came up with the title “Sleep is the New Sex” about ten years ago, thinking I was being very edgy and original. And perhaps I was, at the time, although it’s appeared in various other contexts since. People seem to mean very different things by it. What I mean is that the incitement to discourse that Foucault identifies in the introduction to The History of Sexuality (Volume 1) can be applied to sleep. We believe we have repressed sex, Foucault argues, but in fact this thesis only intensifies our motivation to talk about it. Iteratively pontificating about how we don’t speak about sex suggests that something else is going on, that there is a “speaker’s benefit” to declaring oneself invested in the liberation of sex. Similarly, constantly talking about how we should sleep less, more, or “smarter” has become its own industry. The goal of our podcast is not to reiterate this tedious self-help, but to show what representations of sleep do. Along the way we have talked about fairy-tales, Tumblr memes, sleeping in public, goblin mode, and sleep as performance art.
I had long planned to make a podcast, but when my original 2017 SSHRC grant was cut dramatically I immediately ditched all the peripherals, which sadly included anything that deviated from the necessary goals of academic publication and funding a graduate student. Only after my academic research reached a natural end (and I completed a term as department Chair during which my research was suspended) did I revisit the podcast idea. For anyone contemplating making a feminist podcast, I have more advice than you probably want, so let me just hit three big points.
First, think very carefully about your format. If you’ll have a co-host, your rapport with that person is of the utmost importance. If you’ll interview people, do you have guests in mind (and who will agree to participate)? We aimed for a research-driven, conversational format where two hosts introduce a topic, work through an interview with a guest expert, and interpret their clips for a general audience, although you can do solo monologue, storytelling, group discussion, and many more.
Second, what support resources will be available to you, and how much of the work are you willing to do yourself? I’ve been lucky. The University of Alberta has a Sound Studio that is run by a professional sound engineer, who assembles and masters all of our audio material. Learning how to create and edit high quality recordings is another layer of work you may or may not want. Putting a podcast online also requires a lot of upfront commitment: our producer wrote our music, and I hired a graphic designer to create our logo. We use the podcast hosting platform Buzzsprout, which simplifies a lot, but I still had to learn a lot of new interfaces to figure out how to get the podcast files into an RSS feed and do various technical updates to keep everything moving smoothly. I built the podcast website (sleepisthenewsex.ca) and each episode needs a graphic thumbnail, a title, shownotes, and a transcript—all of which I have to put together before an episode goes live.
Third, don’t under-estimate the amount of work a podcast will be. It takes at least 40 collective hours to produce one of our episodes (of around one hour). The most time-consuming parts for me as host are doing preparatory research for interviews (reading all the relevant academic work of our guest and designing some questions that will bring out its philosophical interest in the most engaging way); storyboarding after the interview to try and work out a structure for the episode based on what our guest said; and then listening back to the audio material after it’s in first draft and iteratively editing, re-listening, editing again, until the producer and I are confident that we have a strong final version. (As many people have pointed out to me, it’s also possible to produce a podcast by sitting down with a microphone and a buddy and recording unprepared chitchat, then putting it online. Unless you are Joe Rogan, you will not get many listeners by doing this. “Two bros and a hot mic” podcasts are to professional radio as unedited Substack ramblings are to an article in Hypatia.)
Why bother? For me, the answer lies in taking research results from a project I know is of very broad interest and communicating them to a completely general audience in an accessible way. Our podcast has more downloads than my most successful publication has lifetime citations. But more than reach, I have enjoyed learning new skills. When I was an undergrad I contemplated a career in radio journalism, and listened keenly to magazine shows. Given the way journalism has collapsed, I’m glad I didn’t choose that path, but podcasting has gone a small way toward scratching that itch. It involves teamwork, storytelling, humour, and communication. Just as Lauren and Ada’s Feminist Making project has extended its reach beyond the book itself, so I hoped that “Sleep is the New Sex” would become a creature larger than a few academic articles. And it has. Listen, follow, and rate us at sleepisthenewsex.ca, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Sleep is the New Sex at sleepisthenewsex.ca as well as on Spotify or wherever you regularly listen to podcasts!
Cressida J. Heyes holds a BA (Hons) in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, as well as an MA in Political Science, and a PhD in Philosophy, both from McGill University. Dr. Heyes is currently Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, holds an HM Tory Chair, and is the past holder of the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality. For more information about their research interests and publications, visit http://cressidaheyes.com.