by micha cárdenas
about micha cárdenas
micha cárdenas (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Art and Design: Games and Playable Media and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. She is the co-editor of “Trans Futures,” a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly and author of Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media.
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What does it mean to become a hashtag? When Black and trans people say they do not want to become a hashtag, the statement is, in part, shorthand for saying that they do not want to die. I imagine they do not want to become like #SandraBland or #TrayvonMartin, people who were murdered by police and vigilantes and became hashtags that spurred massive mobilizations for justice by the #BlackLivesMatter movement (cárdenas 2017). Many trans people of color do not even have the privilege of becoming a hashtag because their deaths often do not become causes for such mobilizations. Yet to become a hashtag is to become multiple, to become a massive flow of information and energy that far exceeds the racialized, gendered confines of a single body. Hashtags as they are popularly known today are corporate commodifications of the means of daily communication and community formation (Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2020). The # symbol is used by social media platforms such as Twitter to allow a quick search of their database of recent posts that contain particular markers, signified to the algorithms of the platform by the # followed by a series of letters and numbers. This is not new...