Johanna Hedva

Born on May 5, 1984, and raised in Los Angeles with one sister, Hedva grew up “in an environment of poverty, addiction, abuse and violence.” Hedva recalls chronically dissociating as early as the age of five, and beginning to write semi-autobiographical stories to cope with her surroundings. As a teenager, Hedva played music, leading the “junk-punk” band Buttcheek Doofus, in which her father played bass.

In 2006, after several years not in school, Hedva began studying astrophysics at a city college, where she remained for two years before transferring to UCLA to study design. Graduating with a BA in Design from UCLA in 2010, Hedva went on to earn an MFA in art at the California Institute of the Arts in 2013, and an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts in 2014.

Sick Woman Theory

Hedva's forthcoming book, This Earth, Our Hospital (Sick Woman Theory, and Other Writings) is a "radically incomplete" project, "a political manifesto that merges with auto-hagiography," about pain, trauma, and chronic illness as they relate to capitalism, vulnerability, and sociality. Informed by Hedva’s experience with endometriosis, bipolar I disorder, panic disorder, depersonalization disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, the book’s central project, Sick Woman Theory, emerged from consideration of people for whom dominant forms of political protest are made inaccessible by disability, illness, or trauma that confines them from public space. In response to the question, “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Sick Woman Theory offers a mode of protest with care and coping at its center, which asks individuals “to take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it,” in resistance to oppressive power structures that do not account for the vulnerability of the body.

Influenced by Ann Cvetkovich's scholarship on depression, Sick Woman Theory takes illness as not a solely biological phenomenon, but a social and cultural one, claiming that “the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression,” and affirming the role of collective historical trauma in producing illness. Hedva also unseats as the supreme authority on illness the “Western medical insurance-industrial complex,” and denies the requirement for an individual to be diagnosed for their struggle to be legitimated. Further, Hedva stresses that the subject-position “woman” was chosen for Sick Woman Theory, “because it still represents the uncared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than, the not yet, the particular rather than the universal,” and makes it explicit that the Sick Woman need not be a woman, but anybody who is not guaranteed care by society.

Sick Woman Theory agitates the binary opposition of sickness and wellness and implicates it as a capitalist construct, in which wellness is linked to ability to work, and sickness is construed as a momentary interruption of this ability. Hedva concerns herself with those who have chronic or terminal illnesses that inhibit employment and do not promise a return to wellness, and who are, as a result, de-valued in a capitalist economy. She also critiques the notions implicit in the concept of healing: that the burden of getting better is on the sick person, and that they can do so if they invest in certain products, therapies, or practices. Rejecting this as “a neoliberal, brainwashing, and a white supremacist idea that stinks of upper and middle class privilege,” Hedva proposes that coping, rather than healing, honors the continuous struggle of living in a society that perpetuates pain. Ultimately, Sick Woman Theory posits that vulnerability and the need for care are not an aberration but reflect the normal state of a body, and that radical political change requires structures of mutual support which acknowledge this.

In Defense of De-Persons

In Hedva’s “second chapter” of This Earth, Our Hospital, “In Defense of De-Persons,” she focuses more specifically on the American Psychological Association diagnosis of depersonalization disorder, or depersonalization/derealization syndrome, characterized by “experiences of unreality or detachment from one’s mind, self, or body,” and implicates the state as an agent of depersonalization, in such cases as the Flint water crisis wherein individuals are made unable to attain self-possession by factors beyond their control, or in instances of dispossession of one’s environment through colonialism or gentrification. In her commitment to Sick Woman Theory as a living project, Hedva also goes on in this essay to critique and revise the theory, recognizing that it “provocatively constructed a new universal subject position,” the Sick Woman against the dominant universal “human.” Hedva interprets her attempt as an act of “melancholic universalism,” borrowing a concept from scholar Sara Ahmed, in which she succumbed to “the requirement to identify with the universal that repudiates you.” “In Defense of De-Persons,” overall, represents a turn away from the universal Enlightenment figure of a “self-determined subject of a rational mind” and a call for a conception of agency that acknowledges how all people are “disordered, messy, and incorrigible,” and in a relationship of interdependence with one another.

Sick Fest

Hedva participated in a 2016 Oakland event partially inspired by Sick Woman Theory, Sick Fest, organized by local authors Amy Berkowitz and Emji Spero. The event, which included performances, readings, and a zine fair, was intended to “provide a platform for people with disabilities or chronic illness to feel connected to a wider community, foster new modes of participation, and encourage radical discourse.”

Processing Foundation

Since 2014, Hedva has served as the Director of Advocacy for the Processing Foundation, an auxiliary operation to the Processing open source computer programming project with the goal “to empower people of all interests and backgrounds to learn how to program and make creative work with code, especially those who might not otherwise have access to these tools and resources.” Hedva joined the project based on her political activism, and her commitment to “open-source philosophy and practice, decolonial politics and action, and to promoting the attenuation of the boundaries between creative disciplines of all kinds.” During a talk at a Processing conference on diversity, Hedva spoke about her goals for the Processing Foundation as “an institution defined by having to constantly re-institute itself,” characterized by continuous growth and criticality. In her role with the foundation, Hedva helped establish a fellowship program in 2015, which focuses on issues of access to Processing software across society. Speaking on the program, Hedva states that “technology can be both a viable artistic medium as well as a model for sociality,” where tools are learned and developed through exploration and collaboration.

Other work

Since 2012, Hedva has written and directed a series of plays and performances titled The Greek Cycle. These plays are adaptations of ancient Greek texts which have been rewritten to include feminist and queer concerns in a contemporary discourses. They take place in unusual locations, such as Odyssey an adaptation of the Homer's Odyssey that was performed in a Honda Odyssey minivan while it was driven by the performers.

She was selected for the 2010 Best Work (Senior), Undergraduate Exhibition Award at UCLA as well as the Marion Lucy Queal Scholarship and is a recipient of the 2013 CalArts Dean's Project Award and Interdisciplinary Grant. She received a Conference Grant and Travel Fund Award from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2015.