ABSTRACT

Sleep appears to have been of no interest to sociocultural linguistics or communication studies. This is in spite of growing attention to the “ignored third” from sociologists and anthropologists, especially in response to rising public, medical and commercial concerns. Having said which, these cognate fields side-step the classist representational politics of sleep which are exposed nicely by a social semiotic intervention like the one reported here. In this regard, the empirical basis of my paper is an archive of promotional materials from some thirty international airlines touting their latest “premium” sleeping services, a key component of current marketing strategies. Through a largely visual, iconographic analysis, I examine the staging of sleep as a sensuous experience and as a deeply affective, intimate encounter between (often male) passengers and (often female) flight attendants. Sleep emerges as a semiotic resource for producing, circulating and normalizing relations of entitlement – a symbolic economy which exceeds and/or intensifies established forms of emotional labour. These highly seductive ways of organizing and envisioning sleep generate the kind of desire necessary for subjugating an otherwise privileged few, and, thus, for exploiting many others.

摘要

睡眠似乎对社会文化语言学或传播研究没有兴趣。尽管社会学家和人类学家越来越关注“被忽视的第三者”，尤其是在应对公众、医疗和商业日益关注的问题时。话虽如此，这些同源领域回避了阶级主义的睡眠表征政治，就像这里报道的那样，这种社会符号干预很好地暴露了这种政治。在这方面，我论文的实证基础是来自大约 30 家国际航空公司的宣传材料档案，这些航空公司宣传他们最新的“优质”睡眠服务，这是当前营销策略的一个关键组成部分。通过大量的视觉图像分析，我将睡眠的阶段作为一种感官体验和深刻的情感体验，（通常是男性）乘客和（通常是女性）空乘人员之间的亲密接触。睡眠作为一种符号学资源出现，用于生产、流通和规范权利关系——一种超越和/或强化既定形式的情感劳动的象征经济。这些组织和想象睡眠的高度诱人的方式产生了征服少数特权者所必需的欲望，从而剥削了许多其他人。