To varying extents,

              and by various ties,

               she belongs to all of us.

 

 

Johanna Hevda writes of the Sick Woman (partially in response to Audrey Wollen's Sad Girl):

 

She is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence – or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence – of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society.

 

Aunt Nobody laboured as a teacher, as a nurse, as a secretary. She laboured as a daughter, as a wife, as a mother. When she sickened, her dollar value increased: her inaction costs money. She is the institutionalised woman in Thea Astley's Drylands whose madness is figured in her impulsive recitation of figures: the number of football jerseys she washes per season, the number of lunches she cuts per week, the number of bedsheets she changes in a year.