Memorializing Pulse

Abstract

Since 2016, the city of Orlando, FL, has remembered the Pulse nightclub massacre through memorial projects honoring the victims and survivors. The process of remembering and memorializing trauma is contentious; debates over how, where, who, and what to remember are about emotions, economics, and politics. Knowing that meaning making and memory are ongoing processes, I use the circuit of culture model to navigate my city’s processes and places of memorializing by visiting and interpreting different sites of memory. I argue for the power of the vernacular memorial, rather than the state-sanctioned, as a more inclusive, living form of memory.