In bed with the audience: The transactional performance of sleep streaming on YouTube and Twitch

This article explores the social media phenomenon of sleep streaming by inquiring into the transactional encounter of the streamer and her audience. Drawing on Performance Studies and digital labour theories, it focuses on the staging of authenticity and community. We identify three distinct types of sleep streams: the torturous chaotic stream, in which viewers actively disturb the sleeper; the intimate caregiving stream, which offers care and soothing presence; and the incidental reluctant stream, where sleep emerges as a byproduct of extended gameplay. Methodologically, we employ close-readings and aesthetic analyses of selected sleep streams. We conclude that the sleeping streamer’s loss of bodily control, whether through exhaustion, snoring or handing over agency to the audience, becomes a spectacle of authenticity and communal engagement. This reveals how market logics invade even the most private bodily states, challenging Jonathan Crary’s suggestion of sleep as one of the last resorts that resists capitalist exploitation.