ABSTRACT
The Eurovision contest is regarded in Turkey as an important platform upon which the nation can represent itself to the West. As victor in 2003, Turkey earned the right to host the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in 2004. Any conception of Turkish modernity is fated to be both Occidentalist and Orientalist in nature. One of the first buildings Ataturk imagined as an adornment to the new capital of the new Turkish state was a Western-style opera house complete with a Western-style repertoire. Watching Erener Sertab's video, or her performance at Eurovision 2003, it is also clear that in order to create a new Turkish identity, something called "the East" has to be imagined. As an auto-Orientalist fantasy, then, Sertab's performance is a way of projecting what the modern Turk both refuses to be, and desires to be. The homoerotic structure of desire in this video, so typical of Orientalist literature and painting, which allows both conditions to be fulfilled simultaneously.
