{"title":"Valuing Trans Lives After Suicide: Rituals of Commemoration in Digital Social Media Culture","authors":"Joe Edward Hatfield","doi":"10.1177/20563051241274680","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In 2014, a trans teenager named Leelah Alcorn posted a suicide letter to her public Tumblr account. Almost a decade later, in 2023, Eden Knight, another young trans woman, posted a suicide letter to her public Twitter account. Both suicide letters went viral and inspired memorial hashtags on the platforms where they initially circulated. In this article, I identify similarities between the cases, conceptualizing both as rituals of commemoration aimed toward restoring value to trans lives lost too soon. My analysis shows how ordinary users leverage the connective affordances embedded within popular social media platforms to sustain structured, value-laden acts of remembrance and mourning. In doing so, I elucidate four stages of the ritual process: (1) sharing suicide letters, (2) enshrining selfies, (3) modulating memories, and (4) casting blame. Ultimately, I argue that trans-led rituals of commemoration can function as justice-oriented tactics of resistance against engrained systems of oppression that perpetuate disproportionally high rates of early death within trans communities.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Media + Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241274680","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 2014, a trans teenager named Leelah Alcorn posted a suicide letter to her public Tumblr account. Almost a decade later, in 2023, Eden Knight, another young trans woman, posted a suicide letter to her public Twitter account. Both suicide letters went viral and inspired memorial hashtags on the platforms where they initially circulated. In this article, I identify similarities between the cases, conceptualizing both as rituals of commemoration aimed toward restoring value to trans lives lost too soon. My analysis shows how ordinary users leverage the connective affordances embedded within popular social media platforms to sustain structured, value-laden acts of remembrance and mourning. In doing so, I elucidate four stages of the ritual process: (1) sharing suicide letters, (2) enshrining selfies, (3) modulating memories, and (4) casting blame. Ultimately, I argue that trans-led rituals of commemoration can function as justice-oriented tactics of resistance against engrained systems of oppression that perpetuate disproportionally high rates of early death within trans communities.
期刊介绍:
Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.