Strike Like a Girl – A Herstory of Stopping Otherwise

Valeria Graziano is an activist and academic who practises and researches ways in which artistic and activist practices can foster different forms of communal living. According to Graziano, joy is not found in escaping political reality, but in transforming it through solidarity, care, collective imagination, and practices that embody a more just future. Joy is not a reward for overcoming struggle; it is a crucial part of the struggle itself.

Moving through half a century of women’s struggles, this lecture follows the strange life of refusing work when that work is both necessary and denied the name of work. From Iceland in 1975, to hospital work-ins and sex workers organising, women have stretched the meaning of striking, asking how social reproduction might be reorganised and what pleasures might be found in collectivising refusal.

The event is a part of the City of Women Festival.

This year’s edition of the festival focuses on the theme of feminist joy. The festival understands joy as more than individual pleasure or an escape from the problems of the world – as a way of connecting with one’s own body, recognising what awakens and brings us pleasure, and as a political tool for fostering practices of encounter, listening and imagining different ways of living together. In doing so, it also draws on Audre Lorde’s seminal essay The Uses of the Erotic. The festival does not offer a single definition of joy, but rather explores it through diverse artistic practices, generations and lived experiences. At a time of increasingly pronounced social polarisation, it seeks to preserve a plurality of perspectives and create space for new communities, unexpected alliances and different futures to emerge.

Valeria Graziano is a cultural theorist, educator and organiser based in Rijeka, where she works as an Associate Professor at University of Rijeka. Her research asks how work can be refused and reorganised, and what forms of pleasure and collective life might emerge in the process. She is one of the convenors of Pirate Care syllabus and collective learning project, as well as the co-author of a book with the same title (Pluto 2025). Over the past two decades, she has been involved in campaigns around precarity, unpaid labour, and feminist organising. (2026)