(Nota: Esta publicación está disponible en español aquí.)
In early June 2019, news began to break concerning the death of a Salvadoran transgender woman, Johana Medina León, of pneumonia, four days after being released from nearly six weeks in ICE custody. Before long, my Facebook feed was filled with stories detailing the persecution Johana faced in El Salvador because of her gender identity; her dangerous journey to the United States to seek asylum; and her final moments as she struggled to save her own life, as it became clear no one else would. She might have saved her own life, if she’d been given the resources. In El Salvador, Johana was a nurse. Johana’s death is tragic for many reasons, not the least of which is that had it not been for social media, it likely would have gone unnoticed.
As social media has become ubiquitous, it has transformed not only into a tool for communication and sociality, but for bearing witness to events, experiences, and people from which we were previously isolated. But what does it mean to bear witness online, and what can thinking about social media as a tool for bearing witness bring to the field of queer STS? What can we learn from the faceless algorithms that curate our content about interpersonal connections we may not initially see?
Johana’s death comes at an especially difficult moment in US queer history, as our leaders take steps to remove trans people from the military, prevent adoption by same-sex parents, and even prohibit the raising of the pride flag at US embassies. Nonetheless, LGBTQIA+/Queer migrants continue to risk their lives to request asylum, based on the idea that even if their rights are being systemically challenged here, they are still better off than in the situations they are leaving. In the case of Johana, she was right; her “positive credible fear finding,”—which would have allowed her to eventually receive asylum—had been handed down two weeks before, but was for unknown reasons still held at the detention center until shortly before her death.
Bearing 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 th