CHAPTER 16
Relief from a Certain Kind of Personhood
in ASMR Role-Play Videos
Emma Bennett
Abstract The writer Emma Bennett first heard ‘ASMR’ (autonomous sensory meridian response) mentioned during interdisciplinary conversations about lullabies and the politics of work and rest while at Hubbub. After Googling the practice, Emma began watching Olivia’s Kissper ASMR to aid sleep and to indulge a long-held susceptibility to ‘tingles’. Here, Emma asks: Could this spectatorial practice aimed at attaining a dreamy, sleepy passivity be reframed as an active research practice? And, might this counterintuitive move raise productive theoretical questions about activity and passivity, questions that open on to the ethics of rest and its opposites?
Keywords Address · Apostrophe · Autonomous sensory meridian response · Body · Performance · YouTube
1. Our encounters take place in a vague but easily imagined context. A room, domestic yet anonymous. A feeling of the door being closed. Not secretive so much as legitimately, respectfully private. Perhaps there isn’t even
)Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
e-mail: e.l.bennett@qmul.ac.uk
F. Callard et al. (eds.), The Restless Compendium,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_16
