For the last three years I have been watching the Eurovision Song Contest with two of my nieces. I think I grew nostalgic of the great fun that watching the show was for me as a little girl, hence the idea to share this with the girls, now 9 and 5. This year the experience has turned into a magnificent lesson in Gender Studies, which is why I’m writing this post. As a researcher, not just an aunt 😉

As you, my reader, possibly know by now the winner turned out to be Austrian singer Conchita Wurst and her atmospheric song “Rise like a Phoenix”. My eldest niece is quite alert to gender matters and highly sensitised against homophobia because of the presence of gay relatives and friends in her life. So I explained to her that both Russia and Belarus had demanded that Conchita’s performance be censored for she happens to be… a lady sporting a beard. The homophobes all over Europe were horrified by her ambiguous looks and, I read on Friday, the Austrians had decided to support their representative by sporting fake bears (or natural ones the men) throughout the show. This is why before the show started, the girls and I built ourselves very nice beards (cut out from paper and painted with coloured pencils, then stuck to drinking straws, in the style of elegant carnival masks).

I loved best the lovely Dutch song and actually voted Conchita’s second best in our own private family vote. My nieces were all for Iceland’s Pollapönk, a band made up of four primary school teachers who charmed the girls with their colourful suits and lively performance. To my pleasure, the lyrics to their song “No prejudice” include the following refrain: “Let’s do away with prejudice/ don’t discriminate, tolerance is bliss/ we got to get together on this/ cross this problem off our list.” My nieces found Conchita charming, we donned our beards as she sang (they made a paper wig for my husband!) and we were all generally happy that the Austrian representative won a very clear victory. It was a big night for Europe, a night in which prejudice was erased, if only a little bit. It all counts.

The following morning, I made a mistake: I Googled Conchita. I had initially decided not to worry about whether Conchita was the classic freak-show bearded lady in post-modern version, or a drag queen but curiosity bested me. Conchita is Tom Neuwirth and, if you ask me, he looks very nice as Tom though far less intriguing than Conchita. I asked my nieces whether they wanted to see Conchita with no make up and no beard and very wisely the youngest said no way. The eldest said yes, why not?… and got monumentally annoyed when she found out that Conchita, after all, was no freakish-looking lady but a guy. I tried to explain the concept ‘drag queen’ to her but she only got even more annoyed. She felt cheated.

So, here I was, the Gender Studies specialist, celebrating charming Conchita’s triumph and considering whether this was the beginning of a new view of gender, with the word ‘person’ taking over, instead of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. And there goes my niece to bring me back down to Earth. For her, sticking up to a woman, no matter in which shape, was fine; defending a man impersonating a woman, bearded or not, not so fine. How naïve of me to think we were moving forward.

Of course, she could not articulate the reasons for her dislike of Tom Neuwirth and I feel guilty for having kept up the fantasy that Conchita might be a girl. To add to this, my mother suggested that Conchita had won because of the morbid interest of audiences on her/his body, an idea which I tried to reject on the grounds of her exceptional voice –but which kept resurfacing as Sunday moved on. Today, Monday, I have decided to write this post but not touch Google again. We’ll see how Conchita progresses or not.

To be honest, let me acknowledge that I don’t sympathise much with male to female transvestites, as they impersonate a type of femininity that only exists in patriarchal fantasies. Sorry. What I like about Conchita is how the beard contradicts this stereotyped view of femininity. I had not classed her with the drag queens actually because they tend to be quite flamboyant and Conchita’s style is more muted. I thought that the beard was a very clever comment on both transvestism and the whole drag queen phenomenon though I may have been duped by the facial hair into, as my niece saw, supporting a guy. Once more.

Let me go back, anyway, to that sweet moment when Conchita took the statuette that goes with the award and I saw on the screen a person, neither man nor woman, for it was an absolutely liberating moment. I have no idea about what Tom Neuwirth meant, maybe he just wanted his 15 minutes of fame, but I just wish there were more Conchitas around –and now I mention this, more men in skirts like the wonderful dancers accompanying the Irish singer. What a pity she didn’t make it to the final…

All in all, I’m still very happy that the homophobes of Europe failed so utterly… Putin, eat this!!

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