Ukrainian nation branding off-line and online: Verka Serduchka at the Eurovision Song Contest

This essay looks at the role of the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual regularised European media event—in fostering the reconceptualisation of national selves of participating states. It draws attention to the representations of ‘new’ post-Soviet national brands at Eurovision in their interspatial (national, international and transnational) and inter-temporal (Soviet and post-Soviet) dimensions using the case of Ukraine. The essay argues that, through the manipulation of gendered, sexual and ethnic stereotypes, and by exploiting a kitsch idiom, the Ukrainian entry by Verka Serduchka in 2007, as well as the online responses to the show, aimed to articulate a vision of European nationhood, which simultaneously staked a position among other states of the former Soviet Union and reconfigured relationships with the shared Soviet past