Sick Girl* Strategies is a platform where sick girls* are not used as stories, symptoms, metaphors, or inspiration. They are authors.
It begins from the insistence that illness narratives do not need to be authorized by medicine, theory, institutions, diagnosis, or recovery in order to become valid. The sick body does not have to wait until it is diagnosed, healed, translated, or made respectable before it can speak. To write from illness is to produce knowledge from the position where knowledge is often denied.
Sick Girl* Strategies understands authorship as a form of survival, refusal, and evidence.
This platform wants to become a lexicon, creating an infrastructure for that knowledge: texts, fragments, visual works, online readings, open calls, conversations, commissions, publications, performances, and unstable forms that do not yet know what they are. It wants to gather more and more words, voices, images, strategies, and contradictions. Not to smooth them into one story, but to let them remain multiple.
Sick Girl* is not a fixed identity. The asterisk keeps her* open. It marks a position of being feminized, doubted, infantilized, medicalized, psychologized, patronized, romanticized, or made unreliable before speaking.
The central method is autotheory: not as a fashionable form, but as a necessary one. Autotheory allows the sick body to think from itself. It does not separate lived experience from analysis, pain from language, the symptom from the system, the personal from the political. It insists that the body that suffers is also the body that theorizes.
Sick Girl* Strategies focuses on autotheory because illness is too often narrated by others: by doctors, institutions, documents, partners, families, employers, insurance systems, academic language, and the clinical gaze. This platform wants to shift authority back to the sick narrator. Autotheory is not one possible decorative mode. It is the condition. It is the refusal to separate the body from the theory produced through it.
The lexicon collects drafts, notes, symptom diaries, screenshots, voice messages, essays, poems, unfinished theories, angry texts, funny texts, impossible texts, texts written from bed, and texts written after not being believed.
Sick Girl* Strategies is a growing publishing body.
It wants to become a place where calls can be made, readings can happen, texts can be commissioned, visuals can circulate, publications can appear, and sick girls* can meet each other not as patients, but as authors of strategies.
The intention is not to represent illness better.
The intention is to build the conditions under which sick girls* can author illness themselves.
And lastly, for now: if sick girls* write, speak, perform, share, publish, and contribute, they should be paid.
In the futures we want to inhabit, this platform must not only be a space. It must be a paid, authored, and published space.
The search for funding is not an administrative afterthought, but part of the politics of the project. Payment is not symbolic. It is a refusal of the expectation that sick, feminized, disabled, precarious, and overexposed bodies should offer their pain for free.
Let’s see how that goes, now that we have created the first free steps.
If you want to join with your own strategy, an idea, a complaint, or a proposal, write to si**************@****on.org. It will be responded to in crip time.
Love and strength to you,
N