A verb as well as a noun, the word “rest” invokes both activity and motivation as well as pause and contemplation. As a concept, rest touches many aspects of our lives: we recover from illness, injury, and burnout; we look for respite from overwork; we try to get a good night’s sleep; we convalesce. 

Rest’s social, biological, and political associations are important but often invisible, threaded into the everyday rhythms of structural forms of harm. For many of us, resting comes along with feelings of guilt or shame. A brief history of the concept and practice of rest reveals that it has often been instrumentalized to enable more labor to take place. Cohorts of artists and authors have sought to invoke the radical potential of rest and link it to resistance by pointing to rest as a racialized and gendered concept. Projects like Rest for Resistance and Nap Ministry highlight who gets to rest, how, for how long, and in what ways, showing that rest always already speaks to structural inequalities and forms of oppression.

For patients—whether living with a disability, recovering from illness, or navigating surveillance and interventions—practices of resting are linked concretely to healing. For caregivers whose companions’ well-being depends on their labor, rest can be essential but hard to come by. Meanwhile, for healthcare workers, conversations about rest revolve around the ways in which overwork affects the quality of care. 

Within late capitalist institutions in the United States, rest is accrued as a ‘benefit’ after a certain amount of time spent at work through Paid Time Off and Family and Medical Leave. Rest is framed as a privilege rather than a right, interrupting or undercutting the value of a worker. While on the job in healthcare, clinicians and trainees are on their feet for long hours, deprived of sleep, and expected to operate at a high caliber throughout burnout. Rest is not built into these infrastructures of care. 

In this issue, we invite submissions around the theme of rest, its (body) politics, and its role in medicine and care. Who gets to rest, when, and how might we rest better, more nourishingly, together? Suggested themes for exploration include but are not limited to:

• Personal or collective experiences of rest
• Rest in contemporary media and literary arts
• Rest and healing, recovery, or convalescence
• Rest and class, gender, and race
• Rest as performance, performances of rest
• Rest and caregiving, burnout, or moral injury
• Rest and social movements
• Rest and public space
• Rest as reparation
• Forced rest
• Critical perspectives on rest from history, anthropology, or related disciplines

Tendon invites submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual arts, and critical perspectives through our Submittable portal until November 20, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found here. Please direct any questions to tendonmag@gmail.com or sarahroth@jhu.edu.