Johanna Hedva – författare

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone’s attention. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model.Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.‘Impassioned, wry, compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal point of her vision – building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears as if it has always been there for us to see. A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.’ Kirkus starred review

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.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.How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.

El capitalismo no solo produce mercancías, residuos y desigualdad: produce también formas de dolor, cuerpos exhaustos, heridos, sobreexcitados y aturdidos. Convierte nuestras vidas en el teatro de la eficiencia y hace de la enfermedad, la fatiga y el malestar no una excepción, sino una condición general. A ese conjunto de sufrimientos y marcas que nos atraviesan lo llamamos dolor capital.Los textos reunidos en este volumen elaboran un mapa social del cansancio, una cartografía de los afectos y malestares contemporáneos. En ellos comparecen el estrés y la depresión, la rabia y la vergüenza, la soledad, el duelo, la indolencia o el resentimiento, no como experiencias meramente privadas, sino como síntomas de una época. Frente a la privatización del sufrimiento y la normalización de la catástrofe, este libro propone una conciencia afectiva del presente capaz de abrir una brecha en él para habitarlo de otro modo. Organizar el descanso, socializar el cuidado, escuchar el cansancio: tal vez ahí empiece hoy una política radical. Tal vez ahí, también, hallemos una forma nueva de estar juntos.