scholarly journals Wild Dances and Dying Wolves: Simulation, Essentialization, and National Identity at the Eurovision Song Contest

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Baker
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest

Turkishness on the stage: Affective nationalism in the Eurovision Song Contest

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-535
Author(s):  
Haktan Ural
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Texts

This study examines the Eurovision stage as a cultural space that cultivated an affective-discursive terrain forging Turkish national identity. It draws upon the media texts as a heuristic to examine how an image of ‘Turkishness’ was created and negotiated. Focusing in particular on four specific cases (Semiha Yankı in 1975, Çetin Alp in 1983, Şebnem Paker in 1997 and Sertab Erener in 2003), this study suggests that the Eurovision stage was a space where ‘Turkishness’ encountered an imagined ‘Europeanness’. In these cases, affective discourses gave meanings of national allegories of ‘Turkishness’ to performing bodies on the Eurovision stage. The affective registers generated a discursive formation shaping the contours of ‘Turkishness’ in relation to Europe. Yet these discourses did not generate fixed and stable meanings. In particular, the construction of national success was negotiated and contested in terms of the appropriateness of the national embodiment.

Queer Patriotism in the Eurovision Song Contest

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Raykoff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
The World

The Eurovision Song Contest, the long-running annual televised popular music show watched by millions of viewers around the world, was first broadcast in the United States in 2016, six decades after its founding in 1956. This considerable delay reflects the musical tastes of American audiences, but even more significantly, it reveals how ideals of national belonging and expressions of patriotism operate very differently in the United States than in contemporary Europe. Through its songs, performers, and rituals, Eurovision plays with notions of the nation-state in ways that call into question conventionally heteronormative and particularly American experiences of national identity and patriotic feeling. Considering Dana International’s 1998 win for Israel, the drag acts of Sestre for Slovenia in 2002 and Verka Serduchka for Ukraine in 2007, Marija Šerifović’s win for Serbia in 2007, and Conchita Wurst’s victory for Austria in 2014, this chapter explores how Eurovision enacts an alternative patriotism through a deliberate crossing and queering of national and sexual identities. This dynamic of “queer patriotism” is one reason that this song contest is so often dismissed by those who resist a more progressive and inclusive notion of global belonging.

t.A.T.u. You! Russia, the global politics of Eurovision, and lesbian pop

Popular Music ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANA HELLER
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
East West

AbstractThe author argues that the success of the Russian pop duo, t.A.T.u., and in particular their participation in the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest, is revealing of the multiple and contradictory ways in which Russia is currently engaging with concepts of the national and the international. Specifically, the essay considers t.A.T.u.’s performance of faux-lesbian pop eroticism as a productive flashpoint of East-West misreading and failed translation that might account for the pop duo’s very different reception in Russia and the West. The controversies and inconsistencies that have followed t.A.T.u are located in the larger context of ongoing debates over the redefinition of post-Soviet Russian national identity and Russia’s emerging role on the global pop cultural stage. From this perspective, it is argued, the t.A.T.u. phenomenon interfaces with aspects of both post-Soviet and international youth cultures, shifts in Russian attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and identity politics, and the contradictory commodification and transnational circulation of distinctive ‘European’ identities that is Eurovision’s stock and trade. Thus, a secondary question addressed by the author concerns the value of Eurovision itself as a subject suitable for serious scholarly engagement.

Queer Patriotism in the Eurovision Song Contest

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Raykoff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
The World

The Eurovision Song Contest, the long-running annual televised popular music show watched by millions of viewers around the world, was first broadcast in the United States in 2016, six decades after its founding in 1956. This considerable delay reflects the musical tastes of American audiences, but even more significantly, it reveals how ideals of national belonging and expressions of patriotism operate very differently in the United States than in contemporary Europe. Through its songs, performers, and rituals, Eurovision plays with notions of the nation-state in ways that call into question conventionally heteronormative and particularly American experiences of national identity and patriotic feeling. Considering Dana International’s 1998 win for Israel, the drag acts of Sestre for Slovenia in 2002 and Verka Serduchka for Ukraine in 2007, Marija Šerifović’s win for Serbia in 2007, and Conchita Wurst’s victory for Austria in 2014, this chapter explores how Eurovision enacts an alternative patriotism through a deliberate crossing and queering of national and sexual identities. This dynamic of “queer patriotism” is one reason that this song contest is so often dismissed by those who resist a more progressive and inclusive notion of global belonging.

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