ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the manner in which Neuwirth models dissent through performative ambiguity, challenging the social construction of gender, sexuality, corporeality, and the trope of drag queening to assert individual agency and narrative authority. Earlier interests in fashion and drag allowed him to craft the theatrical stage persona Conchita Wurst, known mononymously as "Conchita," complete with biographical backstory and a beard, thus launching the musical act epithetically dubbed by the media as "The Bearded Lady." It was also during the Sturm und Drang of the Eurovision Song Contest controversy that the pejoratively intended moniker "Bearded Transvestite" was coined. Appropriating the trope of the "Eurovision diva," his representation of transgressive Otherness through visual, aural, and textual ambiguity granted him considerable social visibility. Whatever the intent of attaching an ambiguously gendered identity to the narrative voice, it emancipates the listeners' imagination and prompts the mapping out of connections among a song's character, narrator, voice-subject (Conchita), and performer (Neuwirth).