Overview

CE Mackenzie's Achy Affects is a trans-genre memoir that boldly reimagines how we care for ourselves and our communities amidst relentless cultural, political, and ecological upheavals. It feels like we're teetering on the edge of unprecedented crises. In the midst of this, as we wrestle with burnout and exhaustion, capitalism demands we push harder, achieve more, and become better. Mackenzie offers a radical alternative: give up the goal and just feel. Organized into four key emotions--wonder, shame, shyness, and nostalgia, with a final meditation on ache itself--Achy Affects confronts the simplistic idea that feelings are either ""positive"" or ""negative."" This tired binary demands we rehabilitate the bad into the good, whether or not this rehab is ethical, or even desirable. Instead, by tuning into the feeling of ache, we can resist these pressures and reclaim our agency through compositions of our own making. In the spirit of public intellectuals like Maggie Nelson and Julietta Singh, Mackenzie weaves their personal experiences of crisis--divorce and coming out, working in drug outreach, top surgery, new parenthood, and traversing the Alaskan tundra--into a nuanced exploration of ache. Through this lens, Mackenzie invites us to live alongside pain, not as something to be fixed, but as something to be understood without judgment or expectation.

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9780822948568

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Reviews

Achy Affects deftly weaves poetics and theory with personal narrative on topics like divorce, 'coming out, ' and on-the-ground work in harm reduction. CE Mackenzie imagines new ways to be in the pains and pleasures--the aches of life--as a refusal of capitalism's demands for product, a position that reframes not only what it means to know and how we know, but also what it means to live a meaningful life or to simply live. Achy Affects offers a breath of fresh air and a much-needed intervention into affect studies and recent resedimentations of a binary of 'good' and 'bad' feeling.--KJ Cerankowski, Oberlin College Achy Affects is a groundbreaking text exploring the multifaceted, rhetorically rich landscape at the intersection of capitalism and healthcare. CE Mackenzie plumbs the depths of selfhood and the expanse of ache and, in the process, illuminates how affect studies can break down structural binaries. This theoretically sophisticated yet accessible text is not to be missed.--Mary Beth Ray, Plymouth State University

an admirably ambitious attempt to overcome 'narratives not of our own making.'-- ""Publishers Weekly"" Achy Affects deftly weaves poetics and theory with personal narrative on topics like divorce, 'coming out, ' and on-the-ground work in harm reduction. CE Mackenzie imagines new ways to be in the pains and pleasures--the aches of life--as a refusal of capitalism's demands for product, a position that reframes not only what it means to know and how we know, but also what it means to live a meaningful life or to simply live. Achy Affects offers a breath of fresh air and a much-needed intervention into affect studies and recent resedimentations of a binary of 'good' and 'bad' feeling.--KJ Cerankowski, Oberlin College Achy Affects is a groundbreaking text exploring the multifaceted, rhetorically rich landscape at the intersection of capitalism and healthcare. CE Mackenzie plumbs the depths of selfhood and the expanse of ache and, in the process, illuminates how affect studies can break down structural binaries. This theoretically sophisticated yet accessible text is not to be missed.--Mary Beth Ray, Plymouth State University

Author Information

CE Mackenzie is a multidisciplinary humanities scholar specializing in health rhetoric, queer and affect studies, and harm reduction. They are currently a postdoctoral associate and the program coordinator for the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

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