Sleep Number became an official health and wellness sponsor of the National Football League (NFL) in 2018, making each active player eligible for a free internet-enabled smart bed. This article investigates the social and digital divides that arise as the NFL and Sleep Number imagine sleep as something “smart” and anchored in technological progress in marketing campaigns. This article argues that while the NFL and Sleep Number package smart beds as empowering and emancipatory, corporate storytelling creates new rest-related obligations and re-constitutes collective understandings of sleep and sleep difficulties along racial, gender, and economic lines. Smarter sleep promotes individualized, market-driven solutions which are at odds with emerging scientific findings that highlight the role of racism and other structural issues in sleep and sleep disparities.
AmruteS (2016) Go the fuck to sleep: Well-being, welfare, and the ends of capitalism in US discourses on infant sleep. The South Atlantic Quarterly115(1): 125–148.
2.
AndersonC (2016) White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
3.
AndrewsDMowerRSilkD (2010) Ghettocetnricsm and the essentialized male Black athlete. In: LeonardDJKingCR (eds) Commodified and Criminalized : New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 63–82.
4.
BarnesS (forthcoming) “The best recovery you could possibly get”: Sleep, rest, and the National Basketball Association. Sociology of Sport Journal38(1). DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2019-0111
5.
BenjaminR (2016) Catching our breath: Critical race STS and the carceral imagination. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society2: 145–156.
6.
BirrellS (2007) Approaching Mt. Everest: On intertextuality and the past as narrative. Journal of Sport History34(1): 1–22.
boydDCrawfordK (2012) Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society15(5): 662–679.
10.
BrownM (2004) Taking care of business: Self-help and sleep medicine in American corporate culture. Journal of Medical Humanities25(3): 173–187.
ChongCFryaerCGuQ (2013) Prescription Use of Sleep Aids Among Adults: United States 2000-2010. NCHS data brief no. 127. American Centre for Disease and Prevention. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db127.htm
GrandnerMAHaleLJacksonN, et al. (2012) Perceived racial discrimination as an independent predictor of sleep disturbance and daytime fatigue. Behavioral Sleep Medicine10(4): 235–249.
24.
HardingS (2008) Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press.
25.
HawzenMGNewmanJ (2017) The Gospel according to Tim Tebow: Sporting celebrity, Whiteness, and the cultural politics of Christian fundamentalism in America. Sociology of Sport Journal34(1): 12–24.
26.
HekmanS (2010) The Material of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
27.
HickenMTLeeHAilshireJ, et al. (2013) “Every shut eye, ain’t sleep”: The role of racism-related vigilance in racial/ethnic disparities in sleep difficulty. Race and Social Problems5(2): 100–112.
KarkazisKFishmanJR (2017) Tracking US professional athletes: The ethics of biometric technologies. The American Journal of Bioethics17(1): 45–60.
31.
KingS (2005) Methodological contingencies in sports studies. In: AndrewsDLMasonDSSilkML (eds) Qualitative Methods in Sports Studies English. Oxford; New York: Berg, pp. 21–38.
32.
KingSCareyRSJinnahN, et al. (2014) When is a drug not a drug? Troubling silences and unsettling painkillers in the National Football League. Sociology of Sport Journal31(3): 249–266.
Kroll-SmithS (2008) Modern work and the sleepy worker. Virtual Mentor10(9): 589–593.
35.
LaplantePAKassabMLaplanteNL, et al. (2018) Building caring healthcare systems in the Internet of Things. IEEE Systems Journal12(3): 3030–3037.
36.
LeonardDGeorgeKDavisW (2017) Football, Culture and Power. New York: Routledge.
37.
LockleySWFosterRG (2012) Sleep: A Very Short Introduction, vol. 295. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
38.
McDonaldM (2019) Screening saviors? The politics of care, college sports, and screening athletes for sickle cell trait. In: SterlingJJMcDonaldMG (eds) Sports, Society, and Technology. Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production. New York: Springer, pp. 247–268.
39.
McDonaldMG (1996) Michael Jordan’s family values: Marketing, meaning, and post-Reagan America. Sociology of Sport Journal13(4): 344–365.
40.
McDonaldMG (2002) Queering Whiteness: The peculiar case of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Sociological Perspectives45(4): 379–396.
41.
McDonaldMGShelbyR (2018) Feminism, intersectionality and the problem of Whiteness in leisure and sport practices and scholarship. In: MansfieldLCaudwellJWheatonB, et al. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 497–514.
42.
MagdalinskiT (2009) Sport, Technology and the Body: The Nature of Performance. London: Routledge.
43.
MahCDMahKEKezirianEJ, et al. (2011) The effects of sleep extension on the athletic performance of collegiate basketball players. Sleep34(7): 943–950.
RoseNNovasC (2005) Biological citizenship. In: OngACollierSJ (eds) Global Assemblages Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 439–463.
55.
SadowskiJ (2020) Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World. Boston: MIT Press.
56.
SafaiP (2013) Sports medicine, health, and the politics of risk. In: AndrewsDLCarringtonB (eds) A Companion to Sport. Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 112–129.
WeeksK (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
70.
WilliamsSJ (2005) Sleep and Society. Sociological Ventures into the (Un)known. London: Routledge.
71.
WilliamsSJ (2011) The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
72.
WilliamsSJWolf-MeyerM (2013) Longing for sleep: Assessing the place of sleep in the 21st century. Somatosphere: Science, Medicine and Anthropology, 19March, p. 19–22.
73.
Wolf-MeyerMJ (2012) The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
74.
Wolf-MeyerMJ (2015) Biomedicine, the whiteness of sleep, and the wages of spatiotemporal normativity in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(3): 446–458.
