This website remembers the life and death of Leelah Alcorn. Alcorn was a trans teenager who died by suicide near her home In Kings Mills, Ohio, on December 28, 2014. Before her death, she scheduled her suicide letter to post to her public profile on the popular social media platform Tumblr. The suicide letter went viral on the website almost immediately.
Not long after, Tumblr users staged a large-scale memorialization effort by creating and sharing content in tribute to Alcorn through the hashtag #leelah alcorn. Their efforts helped to bring Alcorn's story to the center of mainstream news outlets across the world, opening much-needed conversations about the precarious plights of trans youth, many of whom often contemplate suicide before they reach adulthood.
For the last decade, I have studied this case. In addition to writing a dissertation on this topic, I have published award-winning research on Alcorn—and the larger crisis of trans suicide—in my discipline's premiere journals and edited books.
With this website, my goal is to make a small portion of the data I have collected in the years since Alcorn's suicide publicly available in an accessible, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing format. Thus, I have curated, designed, edited, and written an introduction for the document below, which contains a comprehensive look at the 500+ memorial images circulated by Tumblr users to honor Alcorn in the four-year period following her death. By preserving this data in the form of an open-access book, my aim is twofold: (1) to enable future scholarly studies of the dataset and (2) to inspire the continued memorialization of Alcorn and all trans people lost to suicide whose names will never be known.
Alongside a course of ambitious graduate students enrolled in my course Media, Memory, & Culture at the University of Arkansas during the Spring 2024 semester, I also produced a digital archive to store and organize all of the materials featured throughout the document. The archive is available via Omeka.
For any questions or comments about this resource, you may contact me via email at jeh058@uark.edu.
I look forward to hearing from you.
- Joe Edward Hatfield, PhD
FAIR USE NOTICE
This website contains excerpts, images, and other materials derived from public social media platforms.
The use of such materials is conducted in accordance with Section 107 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107), also known as the Fair Use Doctrine.
The materials on this website are used solely for educational, research, and scholarly purposes without commercial intent.
The inclusion of these materials serves to provide critical commentary, analysis, and discussion within an academic framework.
If you are the copyright owner of any material displayed here and believe its use does not comply with Fair Use, contact me, and I will review your concerns.