Sick Girl* Strategies is an online platform for collecting, publishing, and circulating counter-knowledge around illness, pain, exhaustion, medical disbelief, survival, refusal, and embodied experience.
It begins with the collectively written publication and mutant book Chronic Superpositions and Sick Girl Strategies, authored by Nadja Kracunovic and 140 contributors and designed by Camilo Londoño Hernández.
SG*S is a living archive, blog, lexicon, and public space for sick, tired, misread, underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, disabled, chronically ill, exhausted, or otherwise unstable bodies to speak in their own forms.
The overwhelming response to the open call Girl*, are you tired? – in its quality, intensity, pain, and number of contributions – raised a difficult question:
Whose pain gets curated?
From this question came the need to create a simple tool: an online platform through which the works written by contributors could be approached with care, kept accessible, and allowed to continue beyond the printed object.
SG*S gathers different methods of survival and holds them as strategies for maintenance, persistence, and liberation. It presents autotheories, fragments, texts, visuals, symptoms, screenshots, notes, readings, and unfinished forms as knowledge.
At the moment, SG*S consists of:
- The six-volume publication Chronic Superpositions and Sick Girl* Strategies
- a blog space with 140 contributions to the open call Girl*, are you tired?
- a growing lexicon of new terms, unspoken symptoms, and sick vocabularies
- The ongoing home-method A Migrant, A Mutant, and a Sick Girl*, collecting texts from live sessions at Casino for Social Medicine in Berlin
- future online readings, open calls, commissions, publications, and visual contributions
Who is Sick Girl*?
Sick Girl* is not a fixed identity.
The asterisk keeps it open. Girl* does not name biological femininity, but a queer, political, and relational position. It marks bodies and voices that are feminized, doubted, infantilized, medicalized, psychologized, patronized, romanticized, or made unreliable before speaking.
When Girl becomes Girl*, she refuses to stabilize into one gender, one diagnosis, one story, one function, or one acceptable form of suffering.
Sick Girl* resonates with Johanna Hedva’s use of “woman” as strategic essentialism, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thinking around provisional categories, with Paul B. Preciado’s mutant who speaks from the position that was not meant to speak, and with McKenzie Wark’s autotheoretical refusal of a clean, singular self.
In the context of illness, the sick body is constantly observed, interpreted, documented, and narrated by others: doctors, institutions, lovers, families, employers, insurance systems, academic language, and the clinical gaze.
SG*S shifts authority back to the sick narrator.
The question is not only: Can a Girl* speak? But what material, social, medical, financial, and political conditions are necessary for sick bodies to speak, publish, gather, and claim space?
Sick Girls* are not romantic figures. They are not metaphors. They are not automatically empowered by pain, and they are not erased by it either. They live through immigration, war-torn and bombed homelands, lack of medical and financial support, systemic fear, oppressive lovers, chronic bodily pain, fatigue, relapse, care work, art work, activist work, family repair, and daily survival.