CE Mackenzie

CE Mackenzie, PhD, is a multi-disciplinary humanities scholar specializing in health rhetoric, queer and affect studies, and harm reduction. Inspired by their work at syringe exchanges and overdose outreach programs, Mackenzie explores how capitalism and healthcare convene to rhetorically organize our bodies into categories of risk, waste, or worth. Specifically, they challenge the dominant understanding of drug use that coerces people into recovery and pathologizes alternative forms of living in crisis. Capitalist logics—ways of thinking that demand telos or an end product—define one as either healthy or unhealthy, normative or pathological, dysphoric or euphoric. These opposites require one overcome what aches for what cures, whether those cures are real or not. Instead, Mackenzie encourages imaginations of multiplicity and regression (or relapse), that there are many (non-teleological) approaches to understanding drug use, just as there are many ways to understand and reclaim agency over our own bodies.

Mackenzie is currently working on their first manuscript titled, Achy Affects: Feeling Our Way into Deeper Compositions of Selfhood. Their writing can also be found in a number of places, including Prose Studies, The Journal of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, and more. Mackenzie has a PhD in English/Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh, a doctoral certificate in gender studies, as well as an MFA in literature and poetics from Bennington College.