Achy Affects
Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Queer studies scholar Mackenzie's inventive if frustrating debut explores underappreciated, ambiguous "affects" like wonder and nostalgia as a means for rejecting the capitalist drive to reach productive, happy endings. The book cleverly examines the experiences of drug users and queer and trans people to show how both groups are pushed to reach "aspirational" outcomes, whether sobriety or "the fully gendered self," a pressure the author decries as a "loss of multiplicity and the tempering of imagination." Instead, Mackenzie turns toward concepts from the world of harm reduction and affect theory that present drug use and gender as neither positive nor negative, but chronic and "achy." They do so through a complicated Maggie Nelson–esque blend of their own formative experiences, dense critical theory, and literary references, ranging from Anne Carson to Leslie Feinberg, to mixed results. This combination is best when it produces surprisingly poignant analyses, such as when the author reclaims nostalgia as a "form of growth" by reflecting, during a relisten to Elliot Smith's Either/Or, on how, for trans and nonbinary youth, shyness functions as quiet refusal to conform. However, these disparate, slammed-together theories, citations, and memories—which include an unexpected detour into the history of the opioid epidemic in the U.S.—can be a challenge to follow. Still, it's an admirably ambitious attempt to overcome "narratives not of our own making."
