Searching for (meanings of) rest: An elusive concept

As a scholar and a feminist, I find myself fascinated, bewildered, and frustrated by rest on conceptual, empirical, and personal levels. In this Open Forum text, based on a project investigating rest practices as well as articulations of rest and their significance in contemporary Sweden, I draw upon existing research to identify meanings of rest. I discuss the multifacetedness and elusiveness of rest on conceptual levels and as lived experience, noting that this elusiveness is exacerbated by acceleration, “productivism,” and gendered, racialised, and classed power relations as well as compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Situating rest as a justice and access issue and as highly subjective and elusive, the text calls for more research on rest from feminist perspectives.