How girls move:
The strategies and tactics of the resistors
How girls move:
The strategies and tactics of the resistors
Resistance is political and connected to power – in how it is framed and how it is practised. In challenging power, girls push back against neoliberal economic structures, the climate crisis, sexism, misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, imperialism, expansionism, war, militarism and religious fundamentalism.
Girls are not only reimagining a world where none of this exists, they are creating it through bold, creative and sharp tactics and strategies. Girls are practising and defining resistance so broadly that it defies easy categorisation.
The very tactics and principles they bring to their resistance are unique to girls. They are redefining leadership models, pushing back against the need for formalised structures, and bringing entirely new ways of applying feminist principles to their work from the generations before them.
Girls ground their work in the radical imagination necessary to recreate a world so entrenched in systems of inequality. They practise joy as an act of resistance and are deeply connected through sisterhood and solidarity in ways that refect Audrey Lorde’s teaching: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are different from my own.” While they reimagine the world and resist, agitate and transform to create that world, they find new ways of doing this, for themselves and each other.
Reflections on early experiences of resistance shed light on how power builds over time, debunking the common narrative of a singular girl who suddenly found – or was given – her power and how the act of resistance creates space for girls to come into her power. Often by the time we see a girl or woman in a movement or other social change space, she has been finding ways to resist as a way to merely exist since girlhood.
No matter her entry point, girls find ways over, through and under, always coming back to the visions, strategies and tactics that power their activism and reshape the world. Ultimately, girls’ resistance is sparked and sustained where they are, in the worlds they inhabit, through a profoundly human instinct to survive. And perhaps also through something quite unique to girls and this particular life stage – their ability to reimagine and create the worlds they inhabit, wherever they may be.
- Explore: How Girls Move
