The Eurovision Song Contest
by
Abstract: The televised annual pan-European music competition Eurovision started out in 1956 as an aspirational cultural forum to encourage a sense of European belonging among postwar nations. As the size and spectacle of the competition grew over the decades, Eurovision has increasingly provided a campy, ironic, queer commentary on the gap between the utopian principle of “unity and diversity” and the increasing national fragmentation and regional divisions of a post–Cold War Europe.
This essay may be found on page 193 of the printed volume.