‘Party for everybody’? Interrogating the shaping of sexual identities through the digital fan spaces of the Eurovision Song Contest

Halliwell, Jamie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9088-9226 (2021) ‘Party for everybody’? Interrogating the shaping of sexual identities through the digital fan spaces of the Eurovision Song Contest. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This research critically examines Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) fandom to explore how sexuality is shaped within digital fan spaces. Transformations in social media technologies have revolutionised ESC fan practices and what it means to be an ESC fan. I make a case for ESC fandom as a sprawling context through which its digital practices intersect with the performance of sexuality. This research uses a mixed-method approach, that involves experimenting with social media platforms as tools for conducting qualitative research. This includes developing and applying WhatsApp ‘group chats’ with ESC fans and an auto-netnography of my personal Twitter network of ESC fans. I contribute to the geographies of social media, fandom and sexuality in the following ways: I provide the first comprehensive analysis of the digital ecosystem of ESC fandom by mapping the online and offline fan spaces where ESC fandom is practiced. I argue that ESC fan spaces are fluid and dynamic and ESC fans travel between them. I then explore two social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, to understand how ESC fans express, make visible, and negotiate their fan and sexual identities within and across these digital fan spaces. I demonstrate how digital practices of ESC fandom augment the performance of sexuality in new creative ways. Through a critical analysis of socio-sexual digital codes (such as text, images, GIFs), through the lens of queer code/space, I explore how social media ESC fandom simultaneously breaks down and challenges the queerness of ESC fandom. I then proceed to examine the ways straight male ESC fans experience and practice ESC fandom. I develop the theorisation of ‘the closet’, to conceptualising the ‘ESC closet’, to understand how straight men ‘come out’, ‘stay in’ and negotiate their ESC fan and straight identities in online and offline socio-spatial contexts. I conclude by suggesting two ways through which we can use social media technologies and internet-enabled objects to deepen our knowledge regarding the expression of identity.