Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy

In a new project on "the politics of knowledge in an age of stupidity" entitled Dude, Where's My Theory, I have been trying to produce, identify, and enact alternative modes of knowledge production associated with queer modes of being. My intent in this book is to engage and participate in "theories of the alternative," which I distinguish from theories of the dominant. The alternative, in recent years, has been cast as a utopian and potentially naive project, and, in general in academia, a hierarchy of knowledge production prevails within which theories of the dominant are constituted as "high" theory and theories of the alternative constitute "low" theory. The "alternative" in my project constitutes a set of practices already available to cultural producers, theorists, and activists and already in use in a variety of contexts; but these practices and actions are not necessarily considered within a unifying rubric and so can easily be overlooked, even though they constitute a mélange of microevents that actually do offer another space, option, or mode of thinking that opposes, diverges from, and even resists global capitalism and its logics.

In this paper I turn to a contemporary queer band, Lesbians on Ecstasy (LOE), that presents alternative forms of cultural production by playing with the logic of the cover song. Conventionally, covering a song originally crafted by another group or musician has been cast as either a tribute (see recent albums on which performers sing the songs of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen), a pathetic reenactment (the cover band that tries to reproduce mimetically or channel the original band), a quirky interpretation (the French band Nouvelle Vague has recently created lounge versions of New Wave songs), or a revisiting of a timeless classic (e.g., anyone singing "My Way"). The relationship between the original and the cover version is set up within the logic of the "cover" to privilege the original and even to strengthen the notion of originality itself, and it might even confirm some dire pronouncements about postmodern culture as a pastiche of everything that came before. Performing a cover version is, of course, an utterly ordinary thing to do, and most musicians will include one or two covers in their repertoire. So what would make the cover queer, different, or alternative? In what follows I try to flesh out a queer theory of the cover version, and I situate the reperformance of a song in relation to queer forms of history, community, friendship, and generationality. There is nothing necessarily queer or alternative about the cover song, but the performance of covers can be queered, and, in the process, new modes of thinking about time and generational transmission and memory can be opened up.

Contemporary queer performers try deliberately to scramble the predictability of generational models of transmission and the static relations between copies and originals in their performances, and they highlight and emphasize an investment in impersonation, imitation, and derivation. But they do so in a way that cannot be called ironic or camp. The queerest formulation of the relationship between copy and original came, of course, from Judith Butler's pioneering work from the early nineties in which she contested one of the foundations of homophobia, namely, the idea that the relationship between hetero and homo was the relationship of an original to a copy. Using the model of butch-femme, Butler contested the idea that butch and femme lesbians were somehow producing bad copies or cover versions of heterosexual couplehood or gendered relationality, and she showed, through a complex, poststructuralist formulation, that the relationship between copy and original can be reversed. In the process the idea of a congruence between heterosexuality and originality is lost. The heterosexual pairing of male and female, in other words, only looks natural in comparison to the homosexual pairing of butch-femme, and the copy, in fact, lends an air of credibility to the original, thereby making the original dependent upon the copy rather than the other way around.¹

Butler's formulation has resonated across multiple feminist and queer projects and is probably one of the most important critical gestures of...