Achy Affects: Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood

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.” (June)