She’s the frontperson of the noise-punk band Important Part. Her ongoing project “This Earth, Our Hospital” includes the essays “Sick Woman Theory” and “In Defence of De-persons”. The Sick Woman is the child of parents whose indigenous histories have been erased, who suffers from the trauma of generations of colonization and violence. She has published several books in handmade limited editions, and her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Mask Magazine, 3:AM and others. From 2012 to 2015, her series of queered Ancient Greek plays, “The Greek Cycle”, was performed in Los Angeles, in venues like a Honda Odyssey being driven down the freeway. Hedva is the author of the novel “On Hell”, forthcoming from Sator Press in 2018.
She is disabled, queer, gender non-binary, and a witch. Johanna Hedva is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on her mother’s side and, on her father’s side, the granddaughter of a woman who escaped from North Korea. Her forthcoming essay “Letter to a Young Doctor” proposes that healing and justice might be the same. From here, Hedva’s research has shifted toward asking “how can we heal?” with emphasis on the illusory and fractured “we”. Where it proposed sickness as a form of resistance against oppressions of many kinds, Hedva’s next essay “In Defense of De-Persons” (2016) interrogates how neoliberal signifiers of health and productivity have become instituted as properties an individual can “own” – or not.
The essay inspired by that talk, “Sick Woman Theory” (2016), is a document of emergency, a manifesto of desperation and resilience. In 2015, Johanna Hedva gave the lecture “My Body Is a Prison of Pain So I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It and Want it to Matter Politically”.
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