Downwrong: The Pose of Tiredness

Focusing on the writing of Virginia Woolf, this essay offers an account of tiredness that navigates the terms and the posture of recumbency. Woolf's descriptions of tiredness evoke a sense of incurable, ongoing weariness, revealing a deep desire for rest without recuperation and rejecting the moral and bodily economies of production, labor, and uprightness. The tired body lies prone, or "downwrong," eschewing the finality of narratives of recovery or cure in favor of exhaustion's incomplete and endless deferral and delay, which neutralizes binary structures of ability and disability, health and illness.