Doctoral researcher Sarah Boira introduces their Bed Theory, starting with the work of noticing the assumptions and borders of the seemingly mundane object of the bed.
Beds are both seemingly self-evident, mundane objects, and deeply complex ones – witnesses and supports to some of our lives’ most important habits and experiences. A bed is probably where most of us were conceived and born; where we go to rest, heal, and to process emotions; and where many of us hope to eventually die. Yet we rarely stop to question how the way we imagine ‘the bed’, this exceptional site of embodied attunement, of rest, care and desire, structures our daily lives and shapes our social relations. The beds I get to lie in are where I experience some of my deepest moments of connection, even community building, and they are also sites of deep loneliness and pain. In bed, surrounded by pillows and other soft objects that make it easier to endure pain, is where I often lie with the disabled grief of being unable to do things. It is also where I do the imaginative work of dreaming more communal worlds. I love a good bed, and yet I find most of them disappointing. I wish I had a bed that was just for me, somewhere I got to be completely unmasked, and I also wish I had a bed with wheels, or small enough that I could put it in my pocket and bring it out on the beach. I wish I had a bed big enough to fit 10 human friends and many, many cats, and yet the best that seems reasonable to hope for is a double bed in a private room.
In Queer Phenomenology, feminist, queer and decolonial theorist Sara Ahmed describes furniture and its invitation to comfort as a solidification of social presumptions, a way of arranging space around us that makes living and relating in certain ways comfortable at the expense of others (Ahmed 2006, 168). For Ahmed, this comfort is both embodied and social, and so to inhabit a space in unexpected ways implicitly threatens to make us feel both physically and socially out of place (Ahmed 2014, 148). Similarly, for Scot Herring, ‘object usage, object choice, and material conduct pathologizes as well as normalizes individuals as having proper and improper social relations’ (Herring 2011, para. 26) and thus produces social hierarchies. Following Ahmed’s invitation to defamiliarize furniture’s ‘technologies of convention’ (Ahmed 2006, 168) to make space for other ways of life, I suggest that we might use this framework to get curious about how the bed is normatively imagined, how it shapes the ways we live our lives, and what this tells us about the spaces and relationships in which we tend to make care (un)available. In what follows, I begin giving the abstract object of the bed a shake, unsettling some of the symbolic dust that sits upon it, so that we can look at it together, and consider the concrete and material effects that it has on our lives. Let me begin with the bed I find closest to me: a double.
Refusing to take the double bed for granted
For Alecia Beldegreen, ‘the double bed is a statement of intent, representing warmth, sexuality, possibility. First lovers are quick to abandon the constraints of the single bed for a bed more accommodating of their needs’ (Beldegreen 1991, 114). The double bed is fitting for these lovers (probably assumed to be a bed-sharing monogamous and heterosexual couple) because it is the right size, but also because it is made for people like them. To begin defamiliarizing this bed we can start to notice the assumptions it contains. The lovers’ bed is fitting for them because it probably exists in a private room that others rarely access: it is only here that it can represent the warmth, sexuality and possibility that we associate with adult love. The lovers’ move away from the constraints of the single bed is also a presumption about what it means for them to become adults, with adult ‘needs’. It is a presumption that finding a particular form of love will restructure their desires, the way they rest and inhabit space, how they prioritise their time and relationships, and who they go to for support. All these assumptions dance around the image of a double bed: big enough for two, as long as they get on well enough. To refuse to take these things for granted might allow us to do more with the bed, to place it somewhere else (as queer and disabled activists have done repeatedly by bringing beds into public space) or to inhabit it differently (with friends, as throuples…). It might also allow us to imagine children who get to have big beds, adults who sleep alone, and perhaps even beds that don’t serve as clear ‘statements of intent’.
The private bed as Victorian invention
As architecture historian Lawrence Wright has noted in his history of the bed, the private bed is a relatively recent construction (Wright 1962, 12). In early medieval England, the Saxons slept together in common halls and in the Elizabethan Age, it was perfectly proper for people to circulate unbothered through each other’s bedchambers (Wright 1962, 12). It was only in the 19th Century, with the rise of Victorian bourgeois morality, that we began developing contemporary fixations with needing ‘isolated boxes for our rest’ (Wright 1962, 12). As design historian Francesca Berry (2013, 130) has explained, in 19th Century England the headboarded double bed took on important aspirational and ideological meaning as it ‘came to symbolize bourgeois marital union and fertility’ (Marcou 2024, 34). As part of a wider Victorian tendency that increasingly associated single-use rooms with moral virtue, the bedroom was soon established as an exceptionally private space, reserved only for sleeping, sickness, and reproductive heterosexual sex, and accessible only to children and the couple form (Fagan and Durrani 2019, 167; Collins Cromley 2025, 3). These activities, by virtue of being contained in the bedroom, were kept as private as the bed itself and shared only with those who could enter the room.
Despite being accessible only to an urban bourgeois minority, the private bedroom served as an architectural manifestation of the establishment of privacy as a maxim of civilised life, and was therefore mobilised as a tool through which to put the living conditions of the rural and working classes under increased moral scrutiny (Perrot 2018, 15). In addition, as Victorian housekeeping practices were exported through British colonial rule and concerns about hygiene and infectious disease rose, the association between immorality and forms of non-conjugal or private bed use was established across much of the world, with important implications for how we organised access to rest, care and sexuality. The marriage bed was established in this way as ‘the centre of normality’ (Perrot 2018, 53), implicitly pushing all other ways of organising embodied space onto the margins of deviance.
Naming the borders of the bed
As Michelle Perrot (2018, 40) has explained, the designation of spaces for heterosexuality has been implicated in the production of hierarchies (material and otherwise) for centuries. The production of borders around these spaces, whether these be material, cultural or psychosocial (like shame), serves to determine what gets to be (re)produced in a particular societal context. Naming the borders that sit around the bed might therefore allow us to attend to what the bed keeps out: to what and who it polices against and doesn’t welcome. It allows us to understand, for example, that as the designated space in which it is proper to rest or to be sick, the bed also acts to implicitly eliminate tired and sick bodies from public space. We might say that the bed’s invitation to comfort and care is conditional like that of any bordered space: it privileges some bodies over others and recognises only the limited social forms of the couple and the family.
Presented in this way, the bed’s symbolic weight might seem too hostile to contend with, and yet it is from beds that sit within and against this imaginary that much work is done to dream up less conditional infrastructures of care. For poet, writer, educator and Disability Justice practitioner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, their bed is a ‘place of power, (…) the place everything emerges from’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, 182). For Yves Rees, the bed is ‘the supposedly non-productive site sequestered from the marketplace, where those too sick or disabled to participate in the labour force live their lives and do creative, emotional and intellectual work’ (Rees 2021, 14). This dichotomy presents us with the difficult challenge of embracing the bed’s comforts without conforming to its exclusionary politics: it asks that we refuse to give up on softness, even when we have learned it to be so conditional, and invites us to dream beyond the bed’s offer of bordered care. The work that follows is that of imagining a bed that equips us with the comfort of a ‘place of power’ but doesn’t ask us for isolation or normalcy in return.
About the author
Sarah Boira (they/them) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. Their PhD project proposes the field/methodology of Bed Theory, a queer and disabled framework that both interrogates the role of the bed in contemporary society and theorises with beds as platforms for anti-ableist worldbuilding. Sarah also teaches Disability Studies at Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press Books.
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second edition. Edinburgh University Press.
Beldegreen, Alecia. 1991. The Bed. With Thibault Jeanson and Lilo Raymond. Stewart, Tabori & Chang : Distributed in the U.S. by Workman Pub.
Berry, Francesca. 2013. ‘Bedrooms: Corporeality and Subjectivity’ in Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns, English edition, edited by Georgina Downey. Berg.
Collins Cromley, Elizabeth. 2025. ‘Sleeping Around: A History of American Beds and Bedrooms’. Burning Farm, February. https://www.burning.farm/essays/sleeping-around.
Fagan, Brian, and Nadia Durrani. 2019. What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbx2v.
Herring, Scott. 2011. ‘Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood’. Postmodern Culture: Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought on Contemporary Cultures. https://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/material-deviance-theorizing-queer-objecthood/.
Marcou, Constantinos. 2024. ‘From Bed to Bedroom A Genealogical Study of Horizontality in Domestic Space’. Burning Farm, no. 11.
Perrot, Michelle. 2018. The Bedroom – An Intimate History. English translation edition. Translated by Lauren Elkin. Yale University Press.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Rees, Yves. 2021. ‘Thinking Capitalism from the Bedroom: The Politics of Location and the Uses of (Feminist, Queer, Crip) Theory’. Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 121 (1): 9–31. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/105/article/837599.
Wright, Lawrence. 1962. Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed. First Edition. Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC.
