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Abstract
Trans people in the US deal frequently with death, from being mourned while living, to the deaths of community members, to facing their own vulnerability in medical and end of life settings. This thesis focuses on how trans people, using the sites Reddit, Youtube, and Tumblr, take up death through online communities to establish community archives, maintain bodily autonomy, and imagine trans futures. Analyzing 7 months of ethnographic research on Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube, I find that trans social media users in these spaces share resources (financial, medico-legal, and educational), publicly mourn, and express their autonomy in order to manage living in biopolitical and necroviolent systems. In many ways, these survival mechanisms constitute community care work, which expand upon the ways the concept of autonomy is constructed and how we perceive cyberspace as a structure for community connection.