1,000 Acts of Resistance Before International Women’s Day 2027
Let’s Answer Back.
With creative resistance in ordinary life.
Every day, women encounter expectations about how we should look, work, give and behave.
“Be more assertive, but not aggressive. Increase your productivity. Be a perfect mother. Don’t show your age. Fit in. Don’t be difficult.”
The message keeps coming: work on yourself. Become someone better. Someone who fits.
This is an invitation to answer back, to challenge the message instead of making ourselves fit it.
I’m gathering 1,000 acts of creative resistance before International Women’s Day 2027.
You’re invited to add yours.
Take a demand. Make an answer.
Choose a message or expectation directed at you. It might be an advertisement, a piece of advice, a request from your family or an instruction about the woman you should be.
Write a poem across it. Paint over it. Cross words out. Cut it apart and put it back together differently.
If the demand was spoken—or simply understood, or internalised—write it down first. Then make your reply.
Your answer might be fierce, funny, quiet, beautiful or untidy. You do not need to be an artist. You do not need to turn your refusal into something polished or inspiring.
You are not working on yourself. You are working on the message.
The Demand and Your Reply
The constant flow of demands to keep striving comes from a system that costs us rather than supports us.
It’s time to answer back.
This project gathers photographs of women’s creative responses to the messages, constraints and expectations of ordinary life.
Perhaps you are answering:
Advice to become more resilient when the demands never let up.
An advertisement suggesting your body needs fixing.
An expectation that you will always be available.
A request to give more when you have already given enough.
An assumption that organising family life is your responsibility.
You decide what you want to challenge, and how you want to answer.
The original demand is part of the work. Keep enough of it visible—or explain it briefly—so that others can understand what you are responding to.
Add your answer
Choose a demand or expectation you want to challenge.
Make your creative response.
Photograph it and submit it using the form below.
A simple phone photograph is welcome. What matters is that we can see the demand and your reply.
Selected submissions will be shared in the gallery on this website. Together, they will show not just what we have made, but what we are being asked to accept—and how we are answering back.
Why gather 1,000 Acts of Resistance?
Because so many expectations are left for us to question alone.
I want to bring our answers together: to make everyday resistance visible, recognise one another’s experiences and show the different ways women are already refusing to fit.
One creative answer will not change everything. But seeing someone else question a familiar demand can make room for our own disagreement. We can find encouragement, humour and company in one another’s replies.
The aim is 1,000 acts, not another target for any woman to meet. One response is welcome. It does not have to be a grand statement.
What we give, what we refuse and what we protect—for ourselves and one another—can be places to begin.
Keep thinking with me
This project grows out of my writing about radical kindness and my book in progress, Radical Kindness as Resistance: feminist rebellion for ordinary life.
In my fortnightly letters I explore what constraints women experience and how we can challenge those expectations in our ordinary lives, through actions of kindness to ourselves and others that challenge those expectations.
Button: Send me the letters
You are welcome to participate whether or not you subscribe.
