In this incendiary manifesto, Hedva proposes the Sick Woman as an identity that gets ascribed to anyone who is defined by care under capitalism, either that you work in care, or that you need it, and who doesn’t need it? No matter your gender, if you are defined by care, you are feminized, rendered ‘weak’ and ‘vulnerable’, and devalued according to patriarchy. The ‘sick’ part of the Sick Woman speaks to an identity that gets defined by ableism: if you are defined by the care you give and take, you are a person who is unproductive, or a drain on resources, or dysfunctional, or disordered, or incurable, or worthless, etc, ad infinitum – in other words, your embodied existence deviates from ableist standards. Hedva's analysis looks at how ableism is perhaps the most pernicious ideology, because it’s the very bedrock of how we decide whether a person is valued or not. White supremacy, racism, misogyny, transphobia, heteronormativity – all of these things need ableism in order to work because they are means of oppressing people based on an invented hierarchy of superiority and normativity.