Achy Affects is the first affect text to refuse the emotional binary. CE Mackenzie's insistence on recognizing the range of feelings, specifically their collisions and overlaps, is grounded in community outreach, formed through life writing and positioned at the intersections of health rhetoric, trans and affect theories, and composition studies. Organized into four affects-wonder, shame, shyness, and nostalgia-with a final chapter on ache, Achy Affects explores how capitalist logics make communities of people-specifically queer, trans, and drug using-into rhetorical spectacles for the purpose of productive futures. Mackenzie asks how an affective sensitivity toward ache can lead us into deeper compositions of selfhood. Ache, as a heuristic for writing without fix, for writing into the daily and chronic realities of our felt selves, complicates emotion by describing it as collaged, not binaried. Affect has too long relied on dichotomized notions of feeling, but by centering ache, Mackenzie attempts to skirt the trap of positive versus negative to instead release the human body from the spectacle it is forced to perform.
"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
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."
