Taken by a Stranger: How Queerness Haunts Germany at Eurovision

Abstract

Eurovision, with its camp aesthetics, gay fan culture, and European audience, certainly provides the opportunity for queer people to experience a feeling of belonging on both the national and the transnational level, which is rendered more complicated or foreclosed in other cultural mainstream contexts and the public sphere in general. Lena’s victory for Germany in 2010, however, was experienced by many gay fans in Germany – including myself – as somewhat of a disappointment. Unlike Dana International’s victory for Israel in 1998, Germany’s success was not celebrated as an instance that pushed minority rights and sexual liberalism – one possible message of camp aesthetics in the realm of pop culture – momentarily to the forefront of a national or transnational agenda. It did not offer an encounter of gay, lesbian, and transgender politics with national state or European politics that would not only bring queerness into the public sphere but might also have touched the concept of the nation state or transnational union (Rehberg, 2007).KeywordsGender IdentitySexual MinorityFairy TaleGerman NationalityNational SelectionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.