earing witness transnationally
Unfortunately, Johana’s was one more in a long string of queer and trans deaths that have recently dominated my Facebook feed. As a scholar of the Chilean trans movement, I have watched from afar in horror as Chilean activists have responded to a recent wave of hate crimes—including verbal and physical attacks—against their community. Despite Chile’s passage of an LGBT inclusive anti-discrimination law (2012) and the recent passage of a gender identity law (2018), Chile’s LGBTQIA+ community has witnessed a sharp increase in anti-queer attacks in the last several years, including earlier this year, when at least 4 attacks were reported in one week, one of which resulted in the death of 64 year old Alirio Andrade Almonacid. This pattern is hardly unique to the US or Chile; anti-queer violence is on the rise worldwide, and for the first time in human history, we have the ability to bear witness to this violence, often as it’s happening or immediately after. We can no longer think of incidents like the death of these two queer Latinos, thousands of miles apart, as unrelated.
In the early days of Web 2.0, much was made of the potential of social media to unite us across borders (Costanza-Chock, 2008; Harlow & Harp, 2011), building communities without the need for physical contact. To some extent, it has done exactly that. However, in other ways, it has served to show us the darkest sides of ourselves, and has arguably helped to sow the deep division that currently defines many aspects of our world. These technologies do not distinguish between facts and misinformation; social media companies rely on underpaid, overworked, and fallible humans to police an astronomical amount of content based mostly on their own judgment; they have helped to create spaces where hatred thrives, unchecked and unchallenged.
Nonetheless, as the deaths of Johana, Alirio, and countless other queer people around the world remind us, social media also allows us to bear witness to these atrocities and understand them as connected, part of a global system that punishes “the other.” In this way, social media transcends (most) borders, giving us a sense of “being there,” even as we observe events from thousands of miles away. It should remind us as LGBTQIA+/Queer people that although we may not call ourselves the same names or always agree with each other’s tactics, trans- and homophobia are not nationally or culturally-bounded phenomena, and thus neither can the work be that seeks to end them. Moreover, as we are reminded in the case of Johana, transphobia cannot be separated from the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that also contributed to her suffering.
Our Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feeds—overflowing with terrible news like Johana’s death at the hands of ICE, juxtaposed with the beating of a young lesbian couple in Chile, and topped off by the Trump administration’s recent announcement of even heavier immigration arrests in the coming weeks—must also remind us of the need for intersectional (Crenshaw 1991) queer activism. While marriage equality has changed the lives of many queer people for the better (in the interest of full disclosure, mine included), social media allows us to see more clearly than ever where marriage has fallen short. Activists and allies share stories of people with disabilities who would lose their benefits if they married; of record numbers of LGBTQIA+ youth who have been made homeless; and of queer migrants, like Johana, who are systematically being denied basic, life-sustaining medical care.
Unfortunately, social media can also have an “echo chamber” effect, often exposing us to an indigestible amount of news related to our interests and/or identities. The recent tech-driven obsession with constant connectivity has resulted in a feeling—especially for marginalized people—of being constantly bombarded with terrible news. Therein lies the other danger of social media. Do we simply log off? Do we share some—but not all—the information we’re presented with? Does the constant stream of news, pet