Performing the queer network. Fans and families at the Eurovision Song Contest, 12–24.

Authors

• Brian Singleton Trinity College Dublin
• Karen Fricker Royal Holloway, University of London
• Elena Moreo Trinity College Dublin

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which the Eurovision Song Contest has particular meanings for gay spectators; looks at the ways in which some spectators queer the contest via a camp reading strategy; and suggests that the very articulation of these meanings and these reading strategies participates in their exposure—and therefore in the erosion of their signifying power. Thus this essay itself, by analyzing Eurovision’s queerness and campness, helps facilitate the exposure and therefore the breakdown of these previously suppressed, subliminal meanings.