9/11 steel: Distributed memorialization Samuel Holleran School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia Max Holleran School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia Abstract Steel has become the de facto material to memorialize 9/11. In this article, we show how the vast majority of steel from the World Trade Center (200,000 tons) was recycled abroad but what remained was sacralized and made into local memorials. Using newspaper reports and materials obtained from a freedom of information request, the article analyzes how dispersed memorializa- tion honored first responders across the United States (and abroad) enlarging both the geography of trauma and responsibility to remember. We connect the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s curation, gifting, and transportation of 9/11 steel to a form of mourning with military ante- cedents as well as the deliberate focus on strength, masculinity, and participation in the War on Terror. Finally, we show how local memorialization democratized the process of ‘sacred steel’ dis- tribution while also tightly controlling what could be done with salvaged metal in order to make sure that relics remained communal, rather than personalized, objects. Keywords steel, 9/11, memorialization, first responders, relics Introduction In the two decades since 9/11, steel has become the de facto language of memorialization and the placement of salvaged steel beams in small-town memorials has spread the grief Corresponding author: Max Holleran, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia. Email: Max.holleran@unimelb.edu.au Original Article Journal of Material Culture 1–20 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/13591835221139676 journals.sagepub.com/home/mcu