PURE FEELING

La Vierge Couronnée

Diwali, the festival of lights, is an ancient Hindu holiday celebrated in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and diasporic communities throughout the world. Occurring every autumn, Diwali marks the the victory of light over darkness. Throughout the world, millions of lamps are lit in celebration and prayers are offered to the goddess Lakshmi, depicted here with a rose and a peacock, for prosperity and good fortune.  

Paul Klee

This is being written in agitation, exhaustion, and frustration, during a severe flare, while adjusting to dosage changes in my medications, and a move to different country. But it is urgent, it needs to happen now.

I need to address the white people and non-Black POC within the sick and crip communities that I’m a part of, or that have resonated with Sick Woman Theory in their own work. I need to address the white people and non-Black POC within the activist, art, intellectual, political, and literary communities that are the context for my work. I’m specifically addressing white-passing—and therefore white-privileged—non-Black POC, like myself. 

I’m talking to you who count me as a friend, as a colleague, you who reference my work, who list me in your bibliographies, who have cited SWT in your essays or your emails to loved ones, who have supported me at public events or in private correspondence.

It’s becoming harder and harder for me to engage in chronic illness and disability justice conversations, care communities and support groups, or any kind of political activism around ableism, which does not include thinking and work about race, racism, white privilege, and, specifically, systemic white supremacy, police brutality, and anti-Blackness. 

And it’s becoming harder and harder for me to scroll through the timelines of white people, white friends, white colleagues, who are visible as political activists or advocates, as intellectual or critical thinkers, as teachers, as cultural producers, artists, and writers, and who have privilege in their visibility, but who are silent about Black Lives Matter. 

I cannot take seriously any kind of work around ableism, disability justice, chronic illness, neurodivergent and mental illness advocacy, feminism, queer/trans/nonbinary rights, and/or anticapitalism that does not include—no, that does not foreground—the critiquing and dismantling of racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, right now and always.

I am not here for sick and crip justice work that is not actively and visibly in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. 

I am not here for any political activism or cultural production that centers whiteness, Euro-centric beauty, middle-class resources, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity. I am not here for it. 

I am not here for any practices (artistic, political, pedagogic, social, et al) that do not demonstrate actions and work toward anti-white-supremacy, decolonization, and anti-racism. 

I am not here for white cis-het feminists writing about their sadness and pain, but not their privilege, from the comfort of their heated bedrooms that only they occupy, whose medications, rent, and food are paid for by their parents.

I am not here for “anticapitalist” white boys who demand able-bodied revolution in the streets, nor for white protestors at #BLM demonstrations who antagonize the police.

I am not here for white middle-class anarchists who shout for us all to quit our jobs if we’re “serious” about being radical. 

I am not here for white, funded academics talking to each other in air-conditioned auditoriums about “precarity” and “vulnerability.”

I am not here for artists making expensive collectibles for the 1%.

I am not here for white people with a bone to pick about Beyonce “not doing more for her community,” but no critique of any other white celebrity who has said or done nothing about Black Lives Matter.

(This is not an exhaustive list, obviously, it’s just what comes to mind right now.) 

I am not here for any of it.

Sick Woman Theory is not here for it. 

I am not here for it.  

I am here for Black Lives Matter.

hedva

my upcoming talk at the Women’s Center for Creative Work! 

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

(The Question of Mysticism in Sick Woman Theory)

Oct 7, 2015, 7:30 - 9pm

Women’s Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles

Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory proposes that sick bodies are the 21st century’s sites of resistance: chronic, pathologized, and historically feminized illnesses ought to be read as modes of protest against the unlivable conditions of neoliberal, imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy. Sick Woman Theory insists that the definition of “wellness” is a capitalist one — to be well enough to go work — that needs to be rejected. SWT redefines the body with its vulnerability as the default, so therefore, we are constantly (not only sometimes) in need of care and support. Because society has eradicated such infrastructures, what are we gonna do now?

From here, Hedva (herself a spoonie) has wound up at mystical anarchism, which proposes a communal politics of love, where the “self” has been obliterated in favor of the Many. This talk will try to converge the feminist mystical tradition of Marguerite Porete, Simone Weil, etc., who proposed rejecting the body for the sake of love, with an intersectional-feminist, anti-white-supremacist, queer, and crip politics, which foregrounds the body as primary matter. 

A question for the audience: Are these two positions irreconcilable? Please come ready to share and discuss. Light refreshments will be served.

if you plan on attending, please RSVP here!

because of the overwhelming response, the event has been moved to a larger venue that can accommodate more people:

HUMAN RESOURCES 

Carrie Lorig | The Book of Repulsive Women

Häxan (1922)