Achy Affects: Crisis And Compositions Of Selfhood
 

CE Mackenzie's Achy Affects is a trans-genre memoir that boldly reimagines the emotional costs of living through the intersecting crises of healthcare, late capitalism, and identity. The book emerges from Mackenzie's advocacy in community drug outreach, their trans personhood, and their ongoing research in late-capitalist rhetoric. Specifically, Mackenzie explores how drug users, as well as queer and trans people, are asked to perform healing for others - or to arrive at a coherent, marketable self. Achy Affects then goes on to explore ways of rejecting such demands.
Organized into four key emotions-wonder, shame, shyness, and nostalgia, with a final meditation on ache-Achy Affects confronts the simplistic idea that feelings are either "positive" or "negative" and invites us to live alongside pain, not as something to be fixed, but as something to be understood without judgment or expectation.