Peikkous, erilaisuus ja tavallisuus – Käärijä sukupuolen uudelleenkuvittelijana

Abstract

Being a Goblin, Different and Ordinary
– Käärijä Re-imagining Gender and Sexuality

The Finnish artist Käärijä (Jere Pöyhönen) achieved remarkable national and international success through the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023. The official Eurovision Jury placed Käärijä right after the winner, Sweden’s Loreen, and he won the popular vote. His performance Cha Cha Cha was also awarded with the prestigious MTV Music Europe Award, but most interestingly his discernable outfit and choreography were emulated countless times in schools and workplaces, and versions of the tune were performed both by amateurs and professional artists, in Finland and abroad. This essay scrutinizes the Käärijä phenomenon, or movement, in the context of queer theory, critical masculinity studies, and even posthumanities. The interpretation of the Eurovision performance and its media reception presents Käärijä as a goblin-like figure, who manages to embody masculinity and femininity, clumsy ordinariness and queer weirdness in a cartoonish way. It is maintained that Käärijä’s transgressive representation of gender also challenges the heteronormative, monolithic understanding of what it means to be a Finnish man. In their performance, Käärijä and his Eurovision team also momentarily morphed into another, fantastic species, or slipped in between species, in a way that can be described post human.