Transcript I. The ESC as a queer media event

Eurovision Camp Contest
Gay media uses and the ESC as a
queer media event
Structure
I. The ESC as a queer media event
II. LGB media uses and tastes
III. Gay culture: camp and the gay sensibility
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I. The ESC as a queer media event
• Media event (Dayan & Katz)
– Directly relayed
– Contest
– Live, remote, pre-planned ceremony
• Queer media event?
– Appropriated by gay community
– Collective watching
– Gay bars (e.g. Popi)
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Fan sites and parties: gay links
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Eurosong.be
Belgovision
Pink nation
Eurovision radio
Gay Eurovision travel
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Public comments
• EBU
• Steven De Foer – Knack
– Biggest gay party in the world
– Big travelling gay circus
• André Vermeulen – VRT
– Dana International (1998)
– Sweden (2000)
• Contestants commenting
– Russia (2009): Alexander Rybak & Malena Ernman
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Gay & lesbian contestants?
Marija Serifovic?
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Dima Bilan?
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Sakis Rouvas
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II. LGB media uses and tastes
• Why?
• Jan Demulder:
– Guilty pleasure
To me that’s because gays like competitions
but they dislike sports. The Song Contest then
offers an ideal solution. It’s a competition
between countries without the agression. That
makes it interesting. And the glitter and
glamour, of course.
– Not all gays like it
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Research project on LGB media
uses & tastes
• Online survey
• 761 respondents
• Exclusively (60%) or mostly (22%) lesbian
or gay
• Gender balance: 57% male, 43% female
• Age balance: 57% under 30, 43% over 30
• Gay association: 27%
• 50% higher education degree
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Media tastes
• Marked and statistically significant differences
between men and women
• Favourite TV channel: women prefer laddish
VT4 over girly VijfTV
• Favourite TV genre: men prefer talk shows,
lifestyle and music more, women crime drama,
films and sports
• Favourite film genre: men like musical more,
women crime and gangster movies
• Music tastes: men prefer poppy channels and
music, women rock channels and music
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Use of LGB media content
Almost
never
From time
to time
Regularly
Very often
Watching LGB film
11.0%
40.5%
32.3%
16.2%
Watching LGB TV
14.7%
41.0%
31.7%
12.6%
Seeking LGB info on the
internet
23.3%
36.3%
27.5%
12.9%
Visiting websites of LGB
associations
28.4%
33.8%
24.0%
13.8%
Seeking social contact
with LGB’s using the
internet
36.6%
30.0%
20.1%
13.2%
Reading LGB books
35.9%
33.0%
20.1%
11.0%
Reading LGB magazines
46.5%
28.7%
15.9%
8.9%
Listening to music by LGB 46.4%
artists
35.3%
13.2%
5.1%
Seeking a partner using
the internet
17.1%
9.0%
7.1%
66.8%
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• Marked need for LGB content
• Stronger before and at time of coming out
then afterwards
• Role in self-definition
• Age related differences: TV, books and
magazines are (still) more important to
older group, younger group relying more
on the internet
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Appreciation of LGB representation
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Importance
Critical but positive changes
Stereotypical news reporting of gay pride
Gay and lesbian related shows on TV
– The L Word: 71.8% of the women like it ‘very much’,
men 6.1%
– Xena: women 20.2% ‘very much’, men 5.9%
– Will and Grace: men 50.5%, women 31.9%
– Little Britain: men 47.8%, women 30.5%
– Queer as Folk: men 45.8%, women 24.2%
– Queer eye for the straight guy: 38.4% women don’t
like it at all, 25.3% men
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ESC as gay male taste
Men
Women
Like it very much
29.6%
8.7%
Like it
30.1%
22.0%
Don’t like it
17.6%
26.5%
Don’t like it at all
22.7%
42.9%
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In-depth interviews
• 60 respondents
• ESC:
– Negative comments: resisting the cliché
– Knowing other avid fans (mostly gay men)
– Communal watching: social event
– Dress up, sing, have fun: carnival?
– Social: shared preference
• Gay male (music & party) taste & culture
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III. Gay culture: camp
and the gay sensibility
• Camp: theatrical, affected, exaggerated,
homosexual, effeminate
• Susan Sontag ‘Notes on camp’
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Sensibility
Love of the unnatural, artifice & exaggeration
Aestheticism: style over content
Way of looking at things: in the eye of the beholder
Preference for the androgynous and exaggerations of
sex roles (e.g. Mae West)
– Life as theater: playful & ironical
– Connected to homosexuality (e.g. Oscar Wilde)
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Jack Babuscio ‘Camp and the gay sensibility’
• Gay sensibility
a creative energy reflecting a consciousness that is
different from the mainstream; a heightened
awareness of certain human complications of feeling
that spring from the fact of social oppression; in short,
a perception of the world which is coloured, shaped,
directed and defined by the fact of one’s gayness.
• Camp: expresses a gay sensibility
Camp is never a thing or person per se, but, rather, a
relationship between activities, individuals, situations
and gayness.The link with gayness is established
when the camp aspect of an individual or thing is
identified as such by a gay sensibility.
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Aspects of camp
1. Irony: contrast between thing or person and
associations
2. Aesthetics: importance of arrangement, timing & tone
– Style as a means of self-projection, conveyor of meaning and
expression or emotional tone
– ‘Camp aims to transform the ordinary into something more
spectacular.’
– Emphasis on performance rather than existence
– Importance of clothes & decor
– Often exaggerated: stress on stylization
– Not same as kitsch: artistically shallow or vulgar,
sensationalism, sentimentalism & slickness vs. fervent
involvement, identification
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3. Theatricality
– life as theatre, being versus role-playing, reality and
appearance
If ‘role’ is defined as the appropriate behaviour associated with a
given position in society, then gays do not conform to socially
expected ways of behaving as men and women. Camp, by
focusing on the outward appearances of role, implies that roles,
and, in particular, sex roles, are superficial – a matter of style.
Indeed, life itself is role and theatre, appearance and
impersonation.
– passing for straight: playing a role
•
•
heightened awareness and appreciation for disguise,
impersonation, the projection of personality
exaggerated (usually sexual) role playing
– preference for intensity of character rather than content
•
cf. Judy Garland: relate own sense of oppression to
suffering/loneliness/misfortunes of the star
4. Humour: incongruity between object, person or situation
and context
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Gay taste?
• Shared way of ‘reading’ or interpreting culture, based on
shared social experience of marginalisation and
discrimination
• Cf. Hall (1980): encoding/decoding
– Negotiated or oppositional reading
– Pick up coded references to homosexuality
• Importance of social but also media context
– Limited (mainstream) representations
– Cf. Hollywood production code (until 1968)
• Interpretive community: decoding in similar ways
• Larry Gross (1991): reading strategies
– Internalising values of mainstream culture (colonisation)
– Resistance: ignoring mainstream culture; subvert & appropriate
mainstream; create own media
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Queer theory
• Queer: questioning rigidity and binary, exclusive nature
of sexual categorisations
• ‘Queer reading’: reading against the grain (Doty)
– Cf. active audiences, meanings are not fixed
– Deconstructive readings & queer appropriations
• Problem: limited empirical support
– Green: ‘radical subversion’ is assumed
– Gays & lesbians are not necessarily subversive or revolutionary
• Still: subversion & appropriation important
– Cf. Eurovision song context: artificiality, exaggeration and
subversion
– Cf. strong female performers & divas: Madonna, Kylie, Lady
Gaga or Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand
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Dafna Lemish: ‘My kind of campfire’
• ESC and Israeli gay men
• Gays as interpretive community
• Identity as process of becoming through group
socialisation
• Social context: social repression, negative and
stereotypical portrayals
• Resistance: appropriation of mainstream cultural
events
• Research: interviews with viewers and
professionals
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• Shared experience
– Watching together
– Celebrating in Tel Aviv pub Evita
• Camp sensibility: mocking and challenging mainstream
cultural assumptions
– Parody, irony, exaggeration, stylization, nostalgia, humor,
theatricality and artificiality
– Play with gender norms
• Elements they like: big voices, sentimentality,
subversion, bigger than life women, extroverted
expressions of femininity, gender crossing
• Also interpretive distance: irony
• Media event: cf. sports for straight men, escape
• Bonding & brotherhood: campfire feeling
• International dimension: bond with European gay
community
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References
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Babuscio, J. (1977) ‘Camp and the gay sensibility’, pp. 40-57 in R. Dyer (ed.), Gays
and Film. London : British Film Institute.
Dayan, D. & Katz, E. (1992) Media events: The live broadcasting of history.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Doty, A. (1993) Making things perfectly queer: interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Green, A. I. (2002) ‘Gay But Not Queer: Toward a Post-Queer Sexuality Studies’,
Theory and Society, 31: 521–45.
Gross, L. (1991) ‘Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media’, pp.
19-46 in M.A. Wolf & A.P. Kielwasser (eds) Gay People, Sex and the Media. New
York/London: The Haworth Press.
Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, pp. 128-138 in S. Hall et al. (eds.), Culture,
Media, Language. Working papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. London : Hutchinson.
Hoogland, Renée C. (2000) ‘Fashionably queer: Lesbian and gay cultural studies’,
pp. 161-174 in T. Sandfort, J. Schuyf, J.W. Duyvendak & J. Weeks (eds) (2000)
Lesbian and gay studies: An introductory, interdisciplinary approach. London: Sage.
Lemish, D. (2004) « My kind of campfire » : The Eurovision Song Contest and Israeli
gay men. Popular Communication, 2 (1): 41-63.
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Thank you for your attention!
[email protected]
www.ua.ac.be/alexander.dhoest
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