CARE SYLLABUS interview

Victoria Papa: You are a genre-defying creative: working across writing, performance, music, visual art, AI and open-source technologies, and many other forms of expression. How do you arrive at the artforms that you do? Do you feel particularly at home with a given form of expression? 

Johanna Hedva: I think of everything that I do in terms of writing, because I have this definition that writing is just language embodied. And so depending on the thing, I feel like I’m giving a body to a bit of language. That body can be visual or musical or it can be words on a page.

In a practical way, the differences of genre and form matter to my own body. Every morning, I wake up and I come into my study and I write five hundred words, before I speak or eat or really do anything, I sit in silence, I am very still. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Whereas, when I’m playing music, it’s a completely different relationship to my body, to sound, movement. I have to plug in things, in the right order, to make the work, I have to rehearse my voice, my hands. 

What form does is give a sense of the container to rely on, where the walls are, where the floor is. But to me, the most exciting part is how you can shapeshift or fuck with these reliances. To smuggle things in where they are not expected to be, to disguise something that explodes what you assume can happen in that form. That’s where the most exciting shit happens. 

Another way to say this is that I think of all this different mucking around in genre as a kind of drag. When you construct a drag character, you create a narrative: “OK, she has just come from the funeral of her third husband.” Whatever it is, you build the world that this character lives in. I think of my promiscuity between genres as being similar. I think of my main themes as the same no matter what form they’re in, but they’re getting expressed in these different drag personas, they wear different faces, different clothes.

Levi Prombaum: When you speak about drag characters in relation to expressions of genre, I think about magic — drag queens and drag kings are sort of like gender magicians.

JH: I’m excited about this connection, because in witchcraft, there is this term glamour, which is a kind of spell that changes one’s appearance. You cast a glamour if you need to get somewhere where your own body wouldn’t be allowed.

I was raised in part by my Aunt who was a manager in Hollywood, during a certain generation of old Hollywood where many were gay and in the closet. She was also a witch. Growing up, she would tell me that when you get dressed, you think of a word that you want people to think of when they see you. And it’s never “pretty” or “beautiful” or “nice” — but more like “intimidating,” “powerful,” or “bewitching.” You dress toward this word, you build this glamour, a spell to make people think that’s what you are. 

I love thinking of glamour in this way whenever I get dressed, and it has to do with queerness, gender, a way to transform how the body appears. There’s such a strong history of witchcraft being used by queer people throughout time, and especially today. It has to do with this shapeshifting capacity needed for survival, but also the kind of luxury of that capacity to shift and pass and deviate and transform. 

LP: Mysticism is so important to your work as well — can you say more about how magic and mysticism sit together for you? 

JH: Maybe it’s useful to clarify the difference between magic and mysticism — at least, this is a distinction that feels useful to me. I would say a magician is someone who uses “ordinary” materials to transform the environment. So they’re not transforming the materials, per se, but rather using the materials to alter something about the condition of the environment. It’s like this candle that I bought at the supermarket for three euros: it’s an ordinary material that I’m using in a spell to bring honor to my ancestors. I’m trying to alter the condition of the world by investing this humble material with a kind of magic.

For me, it’s devotional. It’s not only about intention setting, which is a way of making meaning, like any form of making meaning, which is to say, bringing value to something. But it’s also about a process of cooking different ingredients together, collecting them, listening to them and the environment around you, and putting these things together in order to enable the conditions around you to be different.  

Mysticism is also devotional for me, but it’s about being in tune with an environment that is unknowable, that’s much bigger than you. The only thing I think you can really do in mysticism is surrender. I’m a very Simone Weil kind of mystic, where the only thing you have to give to God is “I”. And so that’s what you have to give up; it’s this kind of annihilation of the self that happens in mysticism, and the mystic is one who surrenders to that. Mysticism sort of happens to you, whereas magic is more about a diligent practice and labor. 

VP: I’m interested in the distinction between magic and mysticism that you’re unveiling here — particularly the idea that magic is everyday practice whereas mysticism has this ineffable quality to it; an undoing of sorts. Can you say more?  

JH: Maybe astrology is a useful language to explain this. Astrologically, mysticism is on the 6th and 12th house axis. The axes in astrology are like two sides of the same coin: signs and houses on opposite sides express the same idea but in opposite ways. To me, this 6th/12th axis is the devotional axis, but it’s expressed through totally different opposites. 

The 6th house corresponds to Virgo’s house. It’s the house of labor, ritual, and health. It’s any animal that’s smaller than a sheep, anybody that’s below you in status. So an employee, a servant; it’s the house of nurses and nuns. The ritual of the 6th house is this tending, this vigilance, making sure that you clean the altar and sweep the steps of the temple. The 6th house has some of the most powerful magic of all — it’s the work and mundane labor you do every day that keeps you alive. 

The opposite place, the 12th house, corresponds to Pisces. It’s the most mysterious and baffling house of them all. It’s the house of secrets, sorrows, self-undoing, illness, isolation, suffering, institutions of incarceration, slavery: so hospitals, asylums, as well as prisons. It’s the house of sanctuary, privacy, sleep, prayer, karma, and mysticism. It’s the house of surrendering into a disintegration or annihilation, something where you cease to exist. And the big thing — whatever it is, the divine, God, nothingness — is the thing that rushes into that space. It’s totally inaccessible in a normative way. 

To me, the worst euphemism of our astrological moment is that Chani Nicholas says that the 12th house is the house of “behind the scenes work.” No. This is traditionally the house of slavery. You can think of some other neoliberal affirmative euphemism, but not that one. 

The 6th and 12th houses are considered tough in ancient astrology because the malefic planets were said to have their joy there. Mars had his joy in the 6th house — Mars is  desire, courage, passion, and also rage, violence, accidents, injuries — and can really do a lot of damage in the 6th. In other words, the planet of action has the most impact in the 6th because it’s the place where materiality is most affected. And Saturn is said to have his joy in the 12th house, the house of slavery, self-undoing, annihilation. Saturn is the greater malefic — of course he’ll have his joy in such a difficult place as the house of “bane and toil.” I’ve noticed that the majority of my astrology clients, who are crip and/or have chronic illness, have something in either the 6th or 12th house. 

To get back to the distinction, magic would be in the 8th house, Scorpio’s house, which is the house of sex and death and loans and taxes. It’s how we are bound to each other in invisible ways. So, I inherit money from you, but first you have to die; I am given a big insurance settlement, but first I had to be in this horrifying accident. It’s this kind of bondage, this shared condition, that is invisible, but which has a hugely transformative material result. But wherever the energy is, that we can’t see it has to be the primary condition. Magic is in this house — the materiality with an immaterial power. I mean, the Greeks are hilarious, they’re like the house of death is clearly also the house of taxes. And it’s the place of the most power, but the power we can’t see.

VP: The language of the houses — and astrology in general — gives us so much to work with! You’re very informed by Hellenistic astrology. Could you tell us more about what that means? 

JH: Well, when we talk about Hellenistic astrology, we have to always be as critical as we are informed by it, because it’s a colonial project. 

The reason I like Hellenistic astrology is because the primary thing it does is provide a condition, that a planet and house have a condition depending on the sign it’s in, and it’s very much a political condition. That image of your chart — with the little X in the center of a circle, with a ring of the signs on the outside, with the planets in between — that image is not, as it is seen today, a map of your own individual psyche. Any astrologer working before the invention of the psychological self, which is relatively new, would have looked at that as a map of the cosmos, and how you were born at a particular moment in it. 

I find that Hellenistic astrology is a much more complex and subtle way of dealing with the cosmos and their relationship to you than contemporary astrology. It’s not all about you for an Ancient, it’s not fate, but The Fates. The image of the chart shows the many different forces that you are in convergence with, social, political, economic, and generational forces, as much as personal ones. An ancient approach is less about using astrology to make you feel good about yourself, as it’s used today. Astrology to an ancient was like, the world is full of multiple things going on at any given time, and you are just one very small part of it. And the idea of fate in pre-Christian, polytheistic religions was about multiplicities, you had gods and goddesses of everything, and each of them has a pull on you as well as each other. And you can always have a different relationship than the one you’re supposed to have with a God. That’s what the ancient Greek myths are so much about — going against what the fates have in store for you. 

VP: Although astrology is definitely having a moment in popular culture, I still don’t think it’s been given its due as a system of knowledge. In your work, you transgress conventional boundaries by putting astrology and other occult traditions in play with critical theory. How do you integrate the occult with feminist, crip, and queer theory, and other kinds of knowledge bases? 
JH: I think of astrology like you would think of philosophy or literary theory or science. There’s no one true astrology, just like there’s no one true science or literature. When people say to me that they don’t believe in astrology, I’m always like, “But what do you think astrology is?” And they’re like, “This Instagram meme, or newspaper horoscope, said this about me and I don’t agree.” And I’m like, “Okay. Do you believe in books that you haven’t read? In books that have been written by people that you don’t know about?” There are books written in languages that we’ll never know or be able to translate because the language is now extinct, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, or that we ought not to “believe” in them. It’s like asking if you “believe” in science or literature or mathematics.

To go back to that idea that it’s all language on some level, astrology is just another language that we’ve invented to try to articulate our experiences on Earth. Just like any language, it’s been bent to the needs of its Zeitgeist, and sometimes those needs are nefarious. But that’s true of any language. That’s true of science, literature, poetry. 

Astrology has a history as a deviant form of knowledge, because, since the Enlightenment, it’s been systematically removed from the canon of what is deemed “legitimate” knowledge. My questions are: Why? And for whom? What were the conditions that led to that? Medical astrology became illegal to practice in the early 1700s, when a concentrated effort was made to denigrate women healers, midwives, and herbalists. Until then, medical astrology was very much included in the practice of any kind of medicine — the first astrologer in Ancient Greece was a doctor. This is related to Silvia Federici’s work in Caliban and the Witch. Europe in those centuries was finding ways to put women into reproductive, subservient labor. It was actually more at the hands of science that this persecution of astrology happened than at the hands of the church. 

Astrology has persisted as a sort of fugitive practice; like witchcraft or magic, they’re similarly trying to make a meaning that goes against what is considered the “right” or acceptable kind. All these practices that are considered quackery or woo-woo — magic, witchcraft, astrology, tarot, divination, necromancy — all of them have been so denigrated as being legitimate forms of knowledge that to be interested in them at all, you have to seek out these underground spaces.  

That’s one thing about witchcraft that’s important to always remember. It’s super trendy right now, but for the majority of time, you could not tell anyone that you were a witch, the dangers of persecution were real. If you were a colonized people, you could not practice a spiritual tradition that wasn’t Catholicism, Christianity. In order to survive, any of these spiritual practices had to be fugitive, they had to pass, they had to shapeshift. For example, Hoodoo is a Western African Yoruba tradition wearing the disguise of Catholicism so that slaves in the South could practice it. 

I’ve been brought to a point in my adult life of constantly questioning how systems of meaning become — not just normativized — but how they are given power. In my case, I was raised by my mother and my aunt, who were working-class white women in L.A. that didn’t belong to a coven, or post selfies of their altars, or talk in any way about what they were doing. Witchcraft was this very solitary way for them to feel a sense of agency in a life where they really didn’t feel much agency. Then on my dad’s side, there was Korean fortune-telling in my family. But my grandmother’s and dad’s main thing was assimilation — the immigrant survival strategy in America. It was not talked about that this was part of the family tradition, it could not be shared. 

It feels really robust right now, as a practice of resistance, to reclaim these traditions and these bodies of knowledge and meaning that have been eradicated because of colonial-imperialism, and the Enlightenment’s campaign of empiricism and rationalism. It’s coming back now especially, but it has always survived, because it gives oppressed peoples a sense of meaning and agency, a way to understand themselves beyond the normative, and it’s a way to keep specific cultural practices alive. We carry them in our blood. 

VP: As you’re speaking, I’m thinking about how, in recent years, there seems to be a more widespread understanding of the systematic nature of oppression. Our current moment shares some similarities with the sixties, another period of growing political awareness that also saw a resurgence of the occult. These things are dovetailing in our times, too. 

I’m wondering what happens when things — like radical justice and, even,  astrology — become “mainstream.” It seems that they become co-opted and commercialized. We’re seeing this with the theme of our project, care. What are your thoughts about the power of these fugitive traditions when they enter the mainstream? 
JH: There’s a cycle to these popular interests in occult practices. These popular swells of interest usually happen when there’s some kind of fascist or totalitarian or oppressive movement. That’s certainly true since the Enlightenment. Spiritualism and the romantic period coincided with the time that the Industrial Revolution starts to fuck shit up. Wicca was invented in the 50s in England, when postwar England needed something to enchant their world. 

In terms of the question of co-opting, one of the things that I’m learning as I get older is that different generations have different relationships to normativity and power, like, the way they position themselves in relationship to it. Like, my generation absolutely looks with a side-eye to the demand that things become normalized. I’m a Saturn in Scorpio kid, born 1982-85, from the Pluto in Scorpio generation, ’84 to ’96 — queer rights, AIDS, goths, hip-hop, riotgrrrl, grunge boys in dresses — we wanted to have our secret sex party in the dungeon and like, never be normal, right? The fact that these things were brought up into the light is how Pluto works, this cathartic reckoning, a dredging up from the underworld.

But the generation below me, born in the late ’80s and ’90s, have Saturn in Capricorn and Aquarius (along with Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn), they want to change the powerful institutions to include them. They want to change what normativity can include. I notice my age when I’m like, but do we really want corporations to start using our languages, knowing about our identities? But I see, for the younger generation, yes, they want that.

It brings to mind an example: I just watched this YouTube video of James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni having a conversation in the ’70s. It’s just them on a soundstage with some glasses of whiskey and cigarettes, and they talk for two hours. It’s so fabulous.

What’s amazing is that they disagree on everything. And it’s absolutely a generational divide. She’s saying that Baldwin’s generation wanted people to stop being racist because it was a moral duty. Whereas her generation could give a shit about morals — they want money and jobs and power and resources. There are these moments that keep recurring in their talk where they completely disagree. They’re arguing, and then, one of them will be like, “Okay, I see what you mean. You persuaded me.” I feel like this would never happen today, there’s so much animosity between the generations. Baldwin and Giovanni are  so respectful of one another, because they disagree. There’s this moment when she’s like, “How do you feel about my generation, what we’re asking for and what we’re doing? And he’s like, “I cannot explain how much I need you.” I really loved it. I was crying. 

I don’t know — I really think that activism always fails. And that’s the point. I don’t think that you’re going to arrive at a world that is perfect. I think the point is that it fails over and over and over again, and the reason it fails is because you are always necessarily doing something that does not have power in the way that the world is built. So if the younger generation wants to come at it from a different angle, have a different strategy and perspective, different demands — fucking great!

LP: Speaking of generational differences and continuities, I was reading your essay about Lightning Bolt, moshpits, and the sociality of care, from your upcoming book, The Mess. You offer the insight that the cathartic and the carceral are paired together in Western society, and we see this manifest today in cancel culture. Alongside the proliferation of conversations about care and critique within institutions, there are lots of conversations about accountability. Could you say more about how you understand these discourses? 

JH: There are some things about the way accountability is talked about these days that I think are headed in a wrong direction, and that’s primarily the kind that still punishes and achieves justice by banishing someone from the community. Like, having someone’s Twitter taken away, I understand why that feels good in the moment, but I don’t think it’s an effective strategy for long-term change. So often canceling is punitive in a carceral way. By now, I think the idea of punishment and how that becomes a carceral logic is in us, like, in our cells. You know, there is research on how capitalism has actually changed the brain’s hormonal and neurological response to reward, since we’ve been in this system now for hundreds of years. This carceral logic is in us. 

I don’t know what accountability actually looks like in perfect form, and I think that has to be included in any demands of it. Like, I don’t know if having an institution apologize to me is going to do what it’s supposed to do, or make me feel better in any way. 

To me, accountability is about repair, care, education, enmeshment, interdependecies — and, frankly, all of this stuff is a mess to do in practice. It’s fucking much harder than deleting or unfollowing someone and never having to face them again. And it’s not a process that can be written out in a Google doc and followed, like ticking off the boxes, check, we re-educated ourselves on racism, check, we now understand consent forever. I’m totally here for people calling for kinds of justice that are not retributive. But I also think when we’re talking about justice, there has to be enough space for it to be something that never feels good, or whole, or complete. 

Justice is just a big question mark, it looks different for different people. I don’t know if it can be normativized or devised in a way that promises, like, if we just follow this procedure, if we say the right things, then it’ll happen, we’ll have justice. I also think that justice is often situated within trauma, and when you’re talking about trauma, it’s even more of a mess. The question of what people need to heal, to cope, to repair, is never simple and it’s never the same — and it certainly can’t rely on a curative aim, by which I mean, that once we do x and y, the trauma will be “cured.” I think the only useful way to approach trauma is to make space for the truth that it will never be cured — the only healing available is that there might be more space around it, a different relationship to it, that it won’t only be carried within your body. And in terms of justice, all that has to be scaled beyond the individual — it has to exist for the community. Which is just, yeah, a big mess. 

VP: In Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, you write about trauma and healing. “I can’t stand the concept of healing if you don’t also talk about hopelessness, hemorrhaging, the medical-insurance industrial complex, panic, poverty, and boredom. I prefer the term “coping” because it acknowledges the struggle is real.” I wanted to ask more about this concept of coping versus healing. 

JH:  I’ve recently been working on a new piece about reframing hypochondria. I was thinking, well, what is a hypochondriac — what is the problem actually, why is the hypochondriac such a loathed figure? I think it’s that a hypochondriac represents a person who needs too much, their body is too needy.

I was thinking about how, since I started to write about illness, many people have written to me to tell me about theirs. It’s really intense to get those letters, by the way, it’s almost too much for me. They tell me their history of trauma, their medical history, all the ways no one believed them. And they always try to explain the reason why they think they’re sick — a burden most sick people have is to try to account for why they are sick, as if it’s their own fault. 

I read all these letters, and over the years, I’ve read so many different reasons that people venture as to why they’re sick. They really vary. Some say, “I’m descended from slaves,” “I’m the child of rape,” “I was raped for 10 years by my father.” Some say, “I sleep with my cell phone by my head every night,” or “I wear antiperspirant, and I think that’s why I have migraines.”  

In writing this piece, I realized that I believe every single one of them, like every single one, I believe it. I’m like, yeah, of course that would cause pain and suffering, of course that would be traumatic, of course that would make you sick. 

But there’s only one that I don’t believe. And it’s the one that is most often said, the most common one — it’s the person that says, “I’m sick because I deserve it.” That’s the one that sounds the most crazy to me. I don’t think that could be true, and the reason is because it really is just another way of saying, “because I needed too much.” Like, my body needed too much. I just don’t think that such a thing as a condition exists — because I believe that the definition of a body is that it’s a thing that needs. 

“Any thing that needs support” is Judith Butler’s definition of the body, which I’ve agreed with for some time — but in the writing of this piece I realized that’s a redundancy. I would take out the word support, because what else would it need, if not support? This ideology of ableism has conditioned us to believe that our bodies ought never to need, or certainly not need too much, and that requiring support is somehow a failure, a sign of weakness — I mean, what total bullshit.

VP: Some of the guiding questions of our project include “whose role is it to care for whom?,” and “What are the cost, labors, and rewards of care?” We also have a question, “When it might be better to care less?” What would that look like to you? 

JH: I think one of the misconceptions that people have about care is that care is given and taken, and that those are binary. That it’s made into this transactional debt relationship where if I take from you, then I owe you. Or, if I take from society, then I owe them or I’m a burden or whatever. 

I mean, of course, your care relationship is always insolvent. You’re never going to pay any of it back, it’s always going to be one of debt. But the trick here is to reframe what debt means, how it structures our understanding of autonomy, value. The dominant ideology is, if I’m in debt, I’m somehow a moral failure, I have less value as a citizen, I’m not pulling my weight. But really, debt is a way of thinking about interdependency — it’s a relationship that exists in process, in how it entangles us with each other, with resources, with time. We are all of us indebted, in debt, in so many ways, always and forever.

A lot of the stuff that comes up when you’re newly disabled — because of a diagnosis, or an injury, or maybe you got COVID, it happens in many ways — is a measure of your own internalized ableism, which is often just an encounter with the fact that you need, the fact that you need care. We’ve been taught, and everything in our world is suited, to make this an affliction, shameful, a measure of weakness — and one that needs to be punished.  

In crip communities, we like to talk about capacity rather than capability or ability. And I think that’s one of the ways of understanding care. It’s not to say that you should be able to infinitely care for someone else or for yourself. That’s not it at all. The point actually, from a crip perspective, is how hard it is to care for ourselves, for others, how many resources care requires, how much time and energy — and so we can’t and shouldn’t do it alone. 

It’s ableism that insists you should do it all alone, and that your worth as a human is higher if you need less care or support. I think ableism is the most pernicious of the ideologies that structures our world — because it’s so insidious, it’s so unchecked. It’s the bedrock of valuing people based on an invented hierarchy of normalcy. Let me quote Mia Mingus here, who puts it perfectly: “Ableism cuts across all of our movements because ableism dictates how bodies should function against a mythical norm — an able-bodied standard of white supremacy, heterosexism, sexism, economic exploitation, moral/religious beliefs, age, and ability.”

I think the reason why it’s so hard for people to encounter their own ableism is because you really have to look at yourself at your most fragile, vulnerable, incapacitated, and understand that you’re going to die in pain, that you are going to need more and more care, that your suffering will increase. You’re not going to be able to walk. You’re going to get dementia. And yes, these are horrifying things to accept — and certainly to accept that they’re going to happen to you, let alone someone that you love. But what ableism has done is to bring shame, persecution, discrimination to these very natural states of life. To say that pain and suffering and weakness and need are somehow errors, wrong, mistakes. 

That’s why I think it’s so metal, to be crip is fucking metal, because it’s pain, stains, leaks, blood, shit. Really gnarly shit. And it’s not turning away from it, or denying it. It’s facing it, fully, and asking others to face it with you.

When I was doing the book tour for On Hell, I was talking about how I wanted to make a book about rage and care. At one event, somebody in the audience said, “but those are the same.” Oh my god, mind blown. It’s true. The more rage that you feel about something, the more it shows you care for it. 

And vice versa. I’ve never felt more cared for, bodily, emotionally, than when I’m in the audience of a metal show and we all know we’re going to scream our rage at the top of our lungs together. 

When I was at a metal festival a couple of years ago, I asked for ADA seating, and they just gave me a barstool and told me to put it wherever I wanted. At some point, it got really rowdy. This woman and her partner who were standing next to me, they noticed that the crowd was like pushing on me, and I was wobbling on my barstool, and they just stepped in front to protect me. I didn’t say anything to them. They didn’t say anything to me. She just reached over, and brought her husband to stand on the other side. 

Care just kind of shows up that way. That isn’t the version of care that you might think of, someone bringing you soup in bed, or something. It’s more about these collective moments. When we’re talking about care, we’re talking about this really intense kind of capacity that we all have to be together, to do what is needed for us to get together. 

As a crip person, you get good at saying what you need and what you don’t need. And saying what you can and can’t do. In COVID, people were doing that a little bit more. The needs we all have were brought to the foreground, which pushed care to the foreground. We saw that everyone needs these things, everyone needs support. People improvised, tried new things, learned what was possible and not and why. Which is how care works.