Sick Girl* Strategies is an interdisciplinary project that functions as a living archive of sick languages, bodies, and tactics. It gathers terms, gestures, symptoms, medical fragments, diaries, and autotheories and reworks them through actions, texts, images, and necessary exchange within and by the community of chronically ill. 

The project began with the open call Girl*, are you tired?, which received around 160 contributions from across the world—an outpouring that demanded the creation of an evolving online archive.

Throughout 2026, Sick Girl* Strategies continues to unfold through upcoming activities such as online readings and zines, cultivating shared language and a platform for the sick terms.
The next phase begins in June 2026 with the launch of the project’s website and the publication of Chronic Superpositions: Sick Girl* Strategies by Nadja Kracunovic, developed in collaboration with designer Camillo Londoño Fernández.

Our Sick Girl* – the one this project both addresses and represents thrives towards a queer, political, and relational position, refusing to stabilize into a singular gendered identity. I use the term Sick Girl* in a way that resonates with Hedva’s articulation of “woman” as a form of strategic essentialism, drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept. Here, the category is not fixed or natural but deliberately provisional.

Can a girl* speak?

When the Girl is reframed as Girl*, this mutation becomes explicit. Her asterisk liberates her from the confines of assigned gender. Girl* does not signify biological femininity but rather a positionality that disrupts normative expectations of gender, health, and productivity. This position resembles what Paul B. Preciado describes in Can the Monster Speak?, where mutants reject the binaries imposed by heteropatriarchal epistemology, asserting the value of those who have been sidelined. In the context of illness, the sick body is constantly observed, interpreted, and narrated by others: doctors, institutions, filmmakers, lovers, and passers-by. By adding the Sick to our Girl*, we reveal how bodies that deviate from normative frameworks become sites of control, interpretation, and regulation.

Like Preciado’s monster, or McKenzie Wark’s Reverse Cowgirl (an autotheoretical polybiography – a gem), our Girl* speaks out anyway and finds her form, reorienting the subject. This resistance does not pay her rent, provide adequate medication, free her from traumas imposed by systems and families, or secure other forms of support, nor does it reduce the xenophobic, homophobic, and ableist pressures around her. But it gives her back her autonomy, call it asterisk, punk, or her king kong.

The question Can a Girl speak?* therefore shifts. The problem is no longer simply one of representation, but the material and social conditions under which the sick body is allowed to speak, act, and claim space.

My friends, Sick Girls* are diverse bitches who practice endurance amid immigration, war-torn and constantly bombed homelands, lack of medical and financial support, systemic fear, oppressive lovers, and chronic bodily pain. They are neither empowered nor erased by their conditions; they live through them the way they can. They fall apart, vomit, and urinate themselves, performing in society as activists, artists, reparative family members, and supporting partners when they can. There is nothing romantic about the Sick Girls* – only raw, actual, and inevitable.