In an age of pandemics and networks, we'll have to become skilled at doing "bedroom politics" - as both location and topic

Photo by YongGuang Tian on Unsplash

Fascinating piece from the internet-and-culture magazine Logic, on the rise and prominence of “bedroom politics”, by Paolo Gerbaudo and Rahel Süß.

Both a place to do politics from, as social media becomes a zone for contestation, and we handle the reality of being chased indoors and quarantined by biospheric disruptions. And as a “politics of the bedroom”, with the increasing centrality of sexuality and health to our public debate. Is this also where the parallel polis could be partially conducted?

Some extracts below:

At first glance, the bedroom may look like the exact opposite of a political space. If we follow Hannah Arendt’s definition of politics, informed by Aristotle, as comprising any action that is performed in public, bedrooms are quintessentially apolitical. They are where we sleep, make love, tend to the needs of our children, recover when sick, and seek refuge from the outside world.

Yet in our era, this most private of places has been absorbed into the political realm: as a site of our online interactions, as the stage of our self-presentation, and even as a theme of many recent activist campaigns. Exploring this emerging “bedroom politics” stands to reveal something important about the shifting relationship between private and public, and how our political life is being transformed as a result.

These changes are affecting the content of contemporary politics. The transmogrification of the bedroom from a place of rest into a space in which people not only sleep but live and work—and, crucially, participate in political conversations online—goes a long way toward explaining both the form and content of contemporary politics.

This turn brings both opportunities and risks. On the one hand, bedroom politics may offer an opportunity to re-embed causes that may seem lofty in everyday life. Making the political viscerally personal may help politicize more people.

On the other hand, the convergence of the personal and the political may create a situation where we are no longer able to distinguish between the two. Regardless, there is no way to understand the logic of contemporary politics without thinking about the bedroom….

Photo by Greta Schölderle Møller on Unsplash

…The places where politics take place have important consequences for both its form and its content. So what are the implications of the bedroom becoming a place of politics?

At the level of form, we see bedrooms everywhere in online life. They have become the contemporary equivalent of the speaker’s podium. Bedrooms appear as the backdrop in political TikTok and YouTube videos, as well as in political meetings and talks conducted over Zoom.

A widely read 2019 report on the climate movement carried a picture of Paul Campion, a Sunrise Movement activist, in his bedroom in a small apartment in Washington, DC with the caption “the organization’s ‘movement home.’”

At the level of content, politics from the bedroom has to some extent become a politics about the bedroom. Issues that are associated with the bedroom—from sickness to sexuality, housing, and mental health—have become more prominent in political debates. In the era of social media, it has become easier to make the issues contained in the bedroom visible, by representing them though pictures, videos, and other multimedia material recorded there.

Bedrooms and beds have appeared in many recent campaigns. They appear in the campaigns of feminist and LGTBQI+ groups as a means to discuss issues of sexual and reproductive rights, as in #MeToo activist Alyssa Milano’s call for a sex strike, a form of protest that by its very nature is located in the bedroom.

Similarly, housing campaigns such as Generation Rent and #VentYourRent launched in London in 2016, as well as the Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen referendum in Berlin in 2021, often featured images of beds and bedrooms, and saw people complaining about unhealthy housing conditions and difficulty sleeping.

Some scholars have even coined the expression “bed activism” to describe the various campaigns where bedrooms and the act of sleeping are a key theme.

This politicization of beds and bedrooms is not altogether new. Famously, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged a “bed-in,” spending days on end in their bed to protest the Vietnam War. But at the time, their protest was widely criticized as illegible: it was not clear why they would do it in the bedroom. These days, the bedroom is clearly a space where politics takes place.

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