This past weekend, Austrian drag queen
Conchita Wurst won the 2014 Eurovision song contest with the song,
“Rise Like a Phoenix.” Her
initial performance at Eurovision sparked some mean-spirited commentary, not
just because Conchita Wurst is the drag alter-ego of Tom Neuwirth (whose stage
name “Wurst” means, not so subtly, “sausage” in German), but notably because
Conchita performs in women’s clothes, with long hair, long eye lashes, plenty
of make up and a full beard.
Of course, as someone writing about beards, bearding, and
facial hair, I could not be more pleased by Wurst’s gender-bending performance
and the fact that in spite of/because of her appearance, Conchita won. The
importance of Eurovision as a song contest or a European unification event is
debatable, though its political commentary this year, given the tensions
surrounding the Russian presence in Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea, was
undeniable. Still, it’s a big event with millions of people watching, so it
gets significant exposure.
Front and center in these debates were the anti-gay laws recently
passed in Russia. One of Wurst’s most virulent detractors was Vitaly Milonov,
who was instrumental in writing the law against “homosexual propaganda” in
Russia, and who petitioned for removing Wurst from the competition, citing that
she was turning Eurovision into a
“hotbed of sodomy.”
Luckily, Conchita herself takes a more relaxed view of
the controversy. In response to a reporter who asked her reaction to the claims
she was a “pervert” should leave the content she said, “
I have very thick skin.
It never ceases to amaze me just how much fuss is made over a little facial
hair.”
 |
| A "little" facial hair or a lot, it created a lot of fuss. |
A little facial hair, however, can mean oh so much, as I
have already discussed here. To recap, facial hair and beards especially have
been essential constructions of Western masculinity for hundreds of years.
According to Renaissance historian Will Fisher, “facial hair was… ideologically
central in the construction of masculinity.” To be male and adult in the
Renaissance, Fisher argues, is to be bearded. In the eighteenth century, the
beard becomes unfashionable—yet it is still made to matter.
The act of shaving became, in various places in Europe in
the eighteenth century, crucial to the construction of Western civilized masculinity. Modern categories
of race began to be theorized by eighteenth-century natural historians who linked
male heat and semen with the growth of facial hair, further associating beards
with mature, civilized masculinity.
 |
A Russian Beard-tax token from the time of
Peter the Great, who wished to discourage the growth of beards,
which he deemed un-civilized. |
The case of
bearded women, then, was problematic, as they immediately put into question the
notion of gender categories and suggested a problem with the established
continuum of smooth and bearded faces. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure’s Pogonologia: or a Philosophical and
Historical Essay on Beards, was translated from the French and published in
England in 1786. The essay contains its own chapter of bearded women.
 |
Portrait of Barbara Urselin,
17th-century German bearded lady playing a harpsichord. |
According to Dulaure, “a Woman with a beard on her chin
is one of those extraordinary deviations with which nature presents us every
day.” He cites various historical examples of bearded women who were quite
contented with their beards, including “a female dancer [in Venice who]
astonish[ed] the spectators, as much by her talents, as by her chin covered
with a black, bushy beard.” Surely this entertainer is the spiritual ancestor
of Conchita Wurst!
Another proud beard-sporting woman cited by Dulaure was
the “governess of the Netherlands… she had a very long, stiff beard, which she
prided herself on; and being persuaded that it contributed to give her an air
of majesty, she took great care not to lose a hair of it. This Margaret was a
very great woman.”
While these women are perhaps deviations from Nature,
Dulaure also notes that many ladies grow errant hairs on their faces and must
pluck them. Similarly, Sarah Scott’s A
Journey Through Every Stage of Life includes a cross-dressing character,
Leonora, who finds herself under scrutiny by older women for not being hairy
enough in her men’s attire.
Scott writes, “the Widows indeed, and some of the more
experienced Matrons, looked with a Mixture of Scorn upon her [Leonora], and the
antient [sic] Ladies especially, to whose Chins Age had given an Ornament that
even Leonora’s Manhood could not boast.”
Even Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders remarks that, when
considering cross-dressing as a disguise for stealing in, she is “a little too
smooth-faced for a man.” The notion, then, of women more generally having
whiskers is not unheard of in the texts of the time period.
In our own time and place, maintaining control over body
hair is
de rigueur. Even men refer to
“man-scaping” and rebel from the constraints of socially-expected grooming habits
during
“No-Shave November.” Women who refuse to properly control their body
hair are castigated or shamed. One has only to think of Julia Roberts being
attacked in the media for showing a hairy armpit to see the backlash against
female body hair. Though Conchita Wurst is a man performing in drag, her
performance reminds us of how uncomfortable we are with people who break gender
categories in such spectacular ways.
In the Pogonologia,
Dulaure concludes his section on bearded women with a pronouncement that no
doubt many contemporary folks would agree with:
“It is as ridiculous for a man to look like a woman, as
for a woman to look like a man.”
Perhaps the discomfort some people feel upon seeing Wurst
is that she embodies both sides of this
conundrum: she is a man who looks like
a woman, and a woman who looks like a man. Her role as an entertainer gives
her, to an extent, some liberty with her appearance. She, like the bearded
ballerina before her, is an entertainer; her gender performance is part of a
greater theatrical performance. Through her performance and her star-appeal,
however, maybe she can draw our attention to the performative nature of all
gender and the unruly body that contributes to and simultaneously undermines
this performance.
