Competing Femininities: A ‘Girl’ for Eurovision

Abstract

In the days after the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, the internationally acclaimed feminist Germaine Greer wrote in the Guardian about ‘Molitva’ (‘Prayer’), Serbia’s contest entry, sung by Marija Šerifović (Figure 8.1):

It was wonderful enough that a solid plain girl in glasses won [Eurovision] for Serbia with an old fashioned torch-song; that she should have sung it in passionate earnest as a lover of her own sex is what made this viewer switch off the iron and start praying that the gods might let her win. (Greer, 2007: 28)