Central to Motschenbacher's work is the titular Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), where he situates his critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how the annual event serves as a platform for poststructural identity construction. Delving into data from 1956 to 2015, he focuses on three aspects of identity—European, national, and sexual—and how they are constructed and negotiated through linguistic and nonlinguistic strategies. Particular to this book is the process of ‘Europeanisation’, which the author describes as the ‘discursive formation of Europe’ (9) on a widely televised stage where imaginations of the continent are actively constructed through song and dance.
The brief but rich history of the ESC serves as an ideal source of data to investigate how identities can be discursively produced on multiple levels. Motschenbacher begins by introducing the ESC and its rules, history of participation, and political inclinations in chapter 2, and reviewing the current scholarship on critical discourse studies in chapter 3, specifically, using the concept of normativity as an analytical tool to look at European, national, and sexual identity. This is one of the highlights of the author's work: normativity is prominently featured as a lens to look at lyrical and audio-visual discourses within the ESC, breathing a fresh criticality into a popular cultural phenomenon. Linguistic practices such as code-switching and making particular lexical choices are explored in chapter 4 as political discursive tools for performers to convey messages on stage.
Motschenbacher leaves the middle chapters of his book for the bulk of his analysis of the ESC, where he references directly the lyrics of specific songs and notes the language and lexical choices made as a discursive method to construct images of Europe. The nationalities of the singers, and the countries that they represent, are significant contributions to such constructions as well. These linguistic practices, as noted by the author, are strategies that are not apolitical, but overt demonstrations of pride and nationalism that add to the discourse on what it means to be European. Such practices are also observable in sexual identity construction, where heterosexual and homosexual discourses of love and desire are prevalent within song lyrics. The ESC is demonstrably an important platform for queerness to be performed linguistically, and often signposts Europe as an inclusive and diverse transnational community.
A corpus analysis of ESC song lyrics in the final chapters of the book is included as a useful look into common strands of discourses over the years. It is a comprehensive overview of what is discussed within the songs that evinces popular themes and the concomitant shifts that contribute to varying imaginations of Europeanness that might be ‘far off European social realities’ (327). What is crucial to Motschenbacher is how these imaginations are casted as normative—an unstable construction that is subjected to ‘competing discourses about what Europeanness means’ (334). This book is a notable addition to the field of sociolinguistics and critical discourse studies, one that I would recommend to anyone invested in gender or European scholarship.
