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| The Wall Street Journal: Eurovision Song Contest or "Queer Eurovision"? |
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| Pubblichiamo, in lingua inglese, un articolo a firma di Daniel Michaels che analizza il legame che negli anni si è venuto a creare tra comunità gay ed Eurovision Song Contest |
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| Venerdì 25 Marzo 2011 |
| di La redazione di Gaynews |
| in Spettacoli |
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Europhiles like to talk about the “visionaries” who built the European Union’s foundation in the 1950s — but did that vision extend to gay rights and campy music? Scholars say don’t laugh at the thought.
As we explain in today’s Wall Street Journal, academics around Europe, in the U.S. and even further afield have begun serious analysis of the Eurovision Song Contest. The research isn’t musicological — even ardent Eurovision fans rarely argue that the contest has had a significant impact on pop trends in years. Instead, the new scholarly analysis centers on issues of politics, sociology and culture.
One area of intense analysis is links between Eurovision and gay communities in participating countries, often referred to as “Queer Eurovision.” Contrary to the common view that Eurovision is slouching toward vapid mass-market pop, analysts who pursue this area of research see a blossoming in gay culture. As one scholar wrote:
The advocates of this narrative point out that gay audiences, particularly gay men, have for a long time comprised some of the most devoted of Eurovision spectators. According to this account, the song contest, at least since the 1970s, has implicitly but undeniably constituted an annual gay event unchallenged in its scope and significance. Unbeknownst to the presumptively
heteronormative gatekeepers of transnational mass media, many a queer kid of the 1970s and 1980s experienced heady moments of recognition in front of the TV screen every spring. The family event allowed the explication and proliferation of an idiom that was to assist in the queer adolescent’s orientation toward his (and, sometimes, her) alternative future families.
In other words, joke’s on you, hetero eurocrats! Eurovision may have begun in 1956 as the Establishment’s tool for European integration, but by the disco era it had become an alternative-lifestyle rallying ground.
The trend continues today in Eurovision countries outside the EU, scholars say. Big gay-pride parades were staged in Belgrade and Moscow when those cities hosted the contest in 2008 and 2009 respectively.
Robert Tobin, a professor of foreign languages and cultures at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., and Eurovision scholar, theorizes that for gay people on the EU’s less tolerant periphery, Eurovision epitomizes the best of EU culture (even if not the best of its music).
“Europe as an institution is very much about personal freedom and sexual freedom,” says Prof. Tobin. In Israel and Turkey, he notes, “Eurovision fans are fans of a European ideal.” Questo articolo ha ricevuto 533 visite.
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