How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

＂In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, ＂Sick Woman Theory＂, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism--a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies--we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.＂--

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Their novel On Hell was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018, and their writing has been published in Triple Canopy, frieze, and The White Review. Their art work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Performance Space New York; the Museum of Architecture and Design, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. In 2019, they released the album The Sun and the Moon, and in 2020 they released Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poetry, plays, and essays published by Sming Sming and Wolfman Books. Johanna’s second novel Your Love Is Not Good is forthcoming from And Other Stories in the US and the UK.