Date: Friday, November 9, 4:30-6pm
Address: Jackman Humanities Building, Room 100, 170 St. George Street, Toronto.

For the keynote of Sick Theories, Margeaux Feldman and Johanna Hedva will be in conversation about Hedva"s new novel On Hell (2018). On Hell rewrites the Icarus myth from a crip perspective, setting it in 21st-century Los Angeles and exploring the insurrectionary capacity of the crip, queer, sick body. Hedva and Feldman will roam topics like crip futurity, the U.S. prison industrial complex, body horror as a generative genre for disability justice, astrology, and the ways in which health circulates as currency. To close, there will be a brief Q&A with the audience. This talk is free and open to the public.

On Hell transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth), and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism. The book is available through Sator Press.

Content warning: racism, homophobia, transphobia, intergenerational trauma, incarceration, ableism, self-harm.

Johanna Hedva is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on their mother"s side and, on their father"s side, the grandchild of a woman who escaped from North Korea. Hedva is the author of the novel, On Hell (2018, Sator Press). From 2012 to 2015, their 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. Their works of performance, design, and sound have been shown at Machine Project, Human Resources LA, PAM, High Desert Test Sites, the Getty"s 2013 Pacific Standard Time, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Hedva has published books in handmade limited editions, and their fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review, Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Mask, 3:AM, Asian American Literary Review, The Journal Petra, DREGINALD, and others. Their ongoing project This Earth, Our Hospital includes the essays Sick Woman Theory, In Defense of De-persons, and Letter to a Young Doctor.

Margeaux Feldman is a writer, educator, and activist living in Tkaronto. She"s currently finishing up her PhD in English Literature at the University of Toronto, where she"s also a part of the collaborative program with the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Her dissertation, Hideous Girls, Sick Women, traces the legacy of hysteria into our contemporary moment, looking at different sites where teen girls and young women continue to have their sexuality pathologized. Margeaux also holds a Certificate in Community Engaged Learning from the University of Toronto. Her creative and academic writing have been published in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, GUTS Magazine, The Vault, Minola Review, The Puritan, FEELS Zine, Hook & Eye, and she has a piece forthcoming in Invisibilities Zine. She"s currently at work on a memoir entitled The Bed of Sickness: Essays on Care, which chronicles the legacy of sickness in her family, including her mother"s death from cancer, her father"s diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and her own diagnoses of complex-PTSD, anxiety and panic disorders, and fibromyalgia.