This paper contends that the nature of the Eurovision audience (with viewers in more than 40 countries inside and outside Europe) and the commercial practices in which Eurovision is implicated create pressures towards public representations which play on simplified, well-known images of a country or region. In the process, representations live up to televisual constructions of the nation rather than the complexity of the nation itself.
The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights’ and ‘Europeanness’ equally constitute the understandings of ‘the international’ with which Queer International Relations is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber’s reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with ‘queer intellectual curiosity’, this article demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–2014, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe–Russia relations and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions — ranging from detachment to celebration — about ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’ politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality’.
Abstract:The history of war and peacekeeping has little to say about languages or the people who work with them, yet a closer inspection shows that contacts between different languages and the presence of an interpreter were a routine experience during the peacekeeping and peace-building operations conducted by the UN and NATO in Bosnia-Herzegovina. interactions were also encounters between languages. They could rarely be accomplished without at least one interlocutor resorting to a language which was not his or her mother tongue or alternatively without the involvement of an interpreter or translator.
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