THE ETHICS OF OPTING OUT

The Ethics of Opting Out offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of queer theory, including its debates about subjectivity, negativity, defiance, agency, and bad feelings. Focusing on queer theory's stance of opting out of our culture's dominant ideals of the good life––including its neoliberal narratives of success, cheerfulness, good performance, and self-actualization––Ruti builds an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the theoretico-political divisions that have during the last decade animated the field, such as the dispute between its antisocial and social schools.

In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the ideological divisions that have animated queer theory during the last decade, paying particular attention to the field's rejection of dominant neoliberal narratives of success, cheerfulness, and self-actualization.
More specifically, she focuses on queer negativity in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and on the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, David Eng, Heather Love, and José Muñoz. Ruti highlights the ways in which queer theory's desire to opt out of normative society rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely innovative ways at the same time as she resists turning antinormativity into a new norm. This wide-ranging and thoughtful book maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory in order to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.

Mari Ruti is a Professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (Other Press, 2006); A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (SUNY Press, 2009); The Summons of Love (Columbia University Press, 2011); The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Fordham University Press, 2012); and
The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (Columbia University Press, 2013), The Age of Scientific Sexism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), a n d Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015), and Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).