Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, having joined UCSC in 2009. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, specializing in medical anthropology and the social study of science and technology. He is currently working on a book, The Slumbering Masses: Integral Medicine and the Production of American Everyday Life, which focuses on sleep in American culture and its historical and contemporary relations to capitalism.
American sleep science has long participated in fantasies of sleep’s eradication. This paper examines how this desire for sleep science’s apotheosis depends on science-fictional conceptions of human biology and society’s reordering. American medicine deploys sleep as a site for intervention, remaking everyday human physiology in accordance with the rhythms of American capitalism and consumer demands.