On the State of Contemporary Queer Theory: A review of Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

The term queer theory is usually attributed to Teresa de Lauretis, who used it at a 1990 conference on gay and sexuality studies at UC Santa Cruz. Judith Butler, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner and others took up this theoretical torch and constituted an original nexus of queer theory, working out of Foucauldian and Lacanian traditions among others. Texts from Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) to Warner's The Trouble with Normal (1999) were published in quick succession, endowing queer theory with an official seat in academia that has definitively outlived the 1990s. Since this initial renaissance in theory, however, scholars and critics have pronounced queer theory "dead" multiple times – so often, in fact, that it has become harder and harder to take each successive eulogy seriously. While the original interest in and shock factor associated with early iterations of queer theory has arguably died down, a new nexus of scholars has emerged, working at the crossroads of affect theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and decolonial theory, and infusing the original interests and methodologies of queer theory with newfound focuses on everyday life, sovereignty, pleasure, temporality, affect, and – perhaps above all – negativity. Mari Ruti takes these recent developments in queer theory as the starting point for her 2017 The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects. Her book serves at once as an exegetical introduction to contemporary debates in queer theory, a polemical critique of the assumptions that underpin the discipline and its rhetorical flare, and an original contribution to Lacanian scholarship. Praising, critiquing, and working with her many interlocutors – including Lee Edelman, Jasbir Puar, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, Lynne Huffer, and Judith Butler – Ruti's The Ethics of Opting Out serves as a pointed and honest introduction to the contemporary state of queer theory and its psychoanalytic cousins.

Ruti introduces her book by quoting Heather Love: "Resisting the call of gay normalization means refusing to write off the vulnerable, the least presentable, and all the dead" (1). She situates this call to "resist gay normalization" on the side of queer theorists and activists who, in contrast to "mainstream lgbtq activists," insist that normalization – particularly through institutions of Western liberal democracy – has promoted the erasure of queer lives and histories. In Ruti's words, "queer theory's stance of negativity offers a resounding No!" to neoliberal cultural tropes of positivity, inclusion, and domestication, "essentially rebelling against the sugarcoating and depoliticization of life, including queer life, in contemporary American society" (3). Ruti is largely aligned with queer theory's general refusal of neoliberal capitalism's invitation, but part of her critical impetus in The Ethics of Opting Out is to contextualize this No! – to show that it is a No! in response to particular biopolitical regimes of violence, exploitation, and alienation, and not a refusal of life itself. Thus, while Ruti operates under the assumption that most (if not all) contemporary queer theory advocates for some form of negativity, her exegetical task in The Ethics of Opting Out is to delineate precisely what forms of negativity are at work in the field, how they differ, and what stakes are involved in each form. Each chapter traces a series of ongoing debates in the field: relationality versus antirelationality, Lacan versus Foucault, white gay men versus "the rest of us," constitutive lack versus circumstantial lack, and more. While Ruti insists that these differences provide an introductory map of queer theory texts since 2000, she is also clear that they are only meant to be used as guides. The topology of queer theory remains more complex than each differentiation initially implies – and perhaps one of the main takeaways from The Ethics of Opting Out is that these supposed binaries (which are broadly accepted by many scholars in the field, at least schematically) are far more delicate than one might initially assume. Each chapter contains exegetical, polemical, and original work, and Ruti maneuvers fluidly from...