introduction

This module, featuring examples of Johanna Hedva’s genre-defying art, writing, music, and activism, explores strategies of care in end times: eras, like our own, marked by extreme economic inequality, ecological crisis, social division and precarity.

Well-known for their essay, “Sick Woman Theory” (2016) — a challenge to the ableist premise that one must have a public "presence" in order to be political, and a polemical critique of capitalist models of care informed by scarcity and disposability — Hedva’s work asks us to harness the potentials inherent in our bodies’ vulnerabilities and abundant interconnections.

Take, for example, this conception of care advanced by Hedva in the days immediately following the 2016 presidential election, offered as a way forward through the despair, anger, and denial experienced by many on the American left:

“When we cast the blame for the 2016 election toward everyone else but ourselves, we are again refusing to be careful, refusing to know our place in relationship to others, refusing terms other than our own. We who woke up and felt terror at the Trump presidency, when millions have been waking up feeling the same terror every day in American history, the same threat to their wellbeing, health, rights, and lives, the same dazed sorrow and confused fury, we who are new to this ancient and very American feeling must now insist on knowing our place in the unthinkable. If we are terrified that this is our America, we cannot risk the luxury of refusing to confront what America is, and has always been. We cannot afford oblivion. We cannot afford to nurse our shame in private shadows because it embarrasses us, or because we don’t want to believe it’s true. We cannot afford to close our ears to the American song. We must bring the skeletons out of the closet, listen to their history, allow ourselves to be haunted by their ghosts.

By doing this, we can transform our fear into care. Care is an exchange—the words “caretaker” and “caregiver” mean the same thing. We must give it as we take it. The project of becoming an individual on one’s own terms has no room for care, for being careful with each other.”

Confronting our own fears. Recognizing each other’s terror. Listening to history’s skeletons and ghosts. Divesting from individualism. Honoring care as exchange.

These radical insights and measures resonate beyond that post-election aftermath. They lend clarity to our ongoing efforts to address inequalities made even more tangible by the Covid-19 pandemic: a period in which many more of us have been hailed and changed, in Hedva’s words, by “the blast radius of illness and disability.” 

This module gathers together interviews with Hedva on art and politics; music from their 2021 album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House; a recent lecture by Hedva about astrology as language and alternative form of knowledge; a collection of their writings that expand understandings of healing; and a keynote conversation with Hedva’s fellow artist and friend, Constantina Zavitsanos.

In celebrating and re-presenting Hedva’s work, we hope to further extend the invitations that suffuse it: to revalue the stories and people that shapeshift to survive; to bring about luxurious, joyful worlds through care; and to respect our bodies — plainly and beautifully — as things that need.

- The CARE SYLLABUS team