Chronic Superpositions & Sick Girl* Strategies is an auto-theoretical publication, lexicon, glossary, and mutant book grounded in the perspectives of chronically ill, disabled, tired, unstable, and misread bodies. It is written by Nadja Kracunovic, as a reflection process of research done in the period of a year, during 2025-26.
The publication brings together feminist and crip thought, poetry, humor, visual fragments, symptoms, personal narratives, and collective forms of knowledge. It distances itself from medical authority as the only language for illness and instead treats lived experience, contradiction, exhaustion, and refusal as forms of theory.
The word Girl* does not describe a fixed gender identity. The asterisk opens the term toward queer, non-binary, trans, feminist, crip, and non-normative positions. Girl* becomes a space of relation, resistance, and mutation.
As a book, Chronic Superpositions & Sick Girl* Strategies refuses to remain one stable object. It appears as a mutant publication made of several volumes, formats, folds, and scales. Designed for home printing, it can be downloaded, printed, assembled, carried, damaged, repaired, and shared. Each copy becomes slightly different, shaped by the printer, the paper, the hand, and the body that makes it. It’s designer and my friend, Camilo Londoño Hernández, and I call it the mutant book.
This is a DIY publication. Print it at home, at a lover’s, at a stranger’s, or at any print shop, depending on your capacities, resources, and desire to invest. Instead of purchasing the book, you create your own — and send us a picture of how it turned out or mutated.
The publication unfolds through five volumes, each working as a different entry point into the world of the Sick Girl*.
Volume I opens the book through autobiography, brain fog, diagnosis, and the first attempts to write from inside the sick body. It introduces the personal and political grounds of the publication: hospitals, medical language, migration, friendship, disability, and the question of how a body begins to understand itself after being interrupted.
Volume II moves deeper into symptoms, metaphors, and the figures that emerge from them. The woman whose head was on fire, the woman with a spider face, the woman with disobedient hands, and other figures turn pain, fatigue, numbness, and bodily confusion into poetry, image, performance, and narration. This volume asks how illness can be represented without being reduced to a medical case or a romantic symbol.
Volume III introduces the Sick Girl* as a collective and conceptual figure. It moves from the author’s own female-identified experience toward a broader, queer, crip, non-binary, and non-normative position. It also brings in contributions from other sick girls*, turning the publication into a shared archive of strategies, exhaustion, refusal, humor, and survival.
Volume IV comes from the workshop series A Mutant, a Migrant, and a Sick Girl*, held at the Casino for Social Medicine in Berlin. Through performative writing, role-play, and collective storytelling, this volume explores how sick, migrant, and mutant positions can become characters, tools, stories, and ways of thinking together.
Volume V turns toward the clinic, the doctor, and the systems that organize illness. It looks at medical spaces, pharmaceutical power, diagnosis, monitoring, and the transformation of bodies into cases. At the same time, it asks how sick bodies can produce their own knowledge outside the authority of the clinic.
Together, the volumes do not form one linear manual. They create a mutant structure: part archive, part glossary, part artist book, part survival strategy, and part collective body.