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"Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler's work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression-particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick"
-Johanna Hedva, "Sick Woman Theory," Mask Magazine, January 2016
Johanna Hedva came to my attention through the above-quoted essay in Mask. As someone who thinks a lot about the psychic, embodied effects of political oppression, I found in Sick Woman Theory a new way to think about illness as resistance instead of defeat. Hedva, a self-described anticapitalist psychonaut sorceress, has written poetry, plays, novels, myth, theory, and performance pieces, and is at work on a book called This Earth, Our Hospital. She recently completed a five-year project restaging ancient Greek tragedies through a contemporary, queer-feminist lens, which included performing the Odyssey in a Honda Odyssey driving through the streets of L.A. We spoke through Skype in February-Hedva in L.A., with bright sunlight, chirping birds, and whirring helicopters outside; me in Brooklyn, with the sun setting early over patches of leftover snow-about how to harness the power of the Sick Woman to build a more caring, communal world.
Raia Small: You chose to use the subject of the Sick Woman, despite (and because of) the fact that the categories "sick" and "woman" are contested. The Sick Woman is "anyone who does not have [the] guarantee of care," including people who may not be considered sick or identified as women. How can the Sick Woman be an inclusive category without losing its relevance to a particular experience?
Johanna Hedva: Erecting the Sick Woman as...