Affect Theory: The Opioid Epidemic & Contemporary Womanhood
These two essays were written as part of a final project for a course on affect theory—a field of study that examines how feelings move between bodies, environments, and histories. Instead of treating emotion as a purely internal or psychological experience, affect theory in this course asked us to consider the relationship between national as well as particular emotions, and broader social, political, and material contexts.
We were asked to look deeply into our quotidians, dissect even the most fleeting of affects, and choose one ‘negative’ and one ‘positive’ feeling that we hadn't given much thought to before. The following essays are affective reflections grounded in my lived experiences, first as someone who has moved from the highly disparate cities of São Paulo to New York, and second as a young woman expressing gratitude to her own body in the middle of the self-optimization-culture storm. I invite you to find little feelings like these that shatter the way you previously saw the world, making you walk about perhaps more skeptically, or with a more open, grateful heart!
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Negative Affect:
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When I lived in Brazil, my private K-12 school, which I spent most of my life at, is a 16-acre gated, heavily guarded campus that educates the children of the crème de la crème elite of Sao Paulo. Right across the street from the main entrance, is the biggest ‘favela,’ or slum, of the gargantuan city. I was very aware of this, especially how the contrast was so absurd it was almost unbelievable–almost comical. When I moved to New York, my observation of this type of disparity not only followed, but was exacerbated by the more profound neglect of the West Village community. The feeling I have when I am walking to class, crossing Washington Square Park, an epicenter of the tremendously wealthy neighborhood that is the West Village, and I am faced with person after person injecting heroin into crevices of their bodies I didn't even know you could shoot up in, or revealing smokey noses after huffing crack in pieces of aluminum foil, is simply “at the edge of semantics.”
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Growing up (sadly but truthfully) idolizing opioid-addicted rockstars and powder-sniffing, yet beautiful and glamorous iconic heroin-chic models, I've always understood drugs, but from afar. Being faced with dirty, bent needles and meth bongs at 8:00 in the morning while going to classes where we discuss the Sackler family's wrongdoings and the horrors of gentrification is shocking, frankly terrifying, but also so, so, deeply disappointing. So many questions come to mind when this affect take over my body—How can a city let an issue get so bad, they become so seemingly blasé about it, and let these individuals, who have perhaps been nothing but failed by their societies, do these increasingly lethal things mere feet away from busy childrens’ playgrounds? How can a park so mostly well-maintained and patrolled, where hedge-fund managers play fetch with their dogs after work in the southeast lawn, where tourist groups come in masses to photograph each other under the arch, knowingly leave the MacDougal-Washington Square N corner to be colonized by drug deals in broad daylight? To be peppered with catatonic bodies, closer to death than life? I am not taking a gentrifier-stance here. The affect, or feeling I get is utter despair, and simply writing about this, my eyes have welled with tears. Berlant's concept of ‘crisis ordinariness’ applies deeply here; this is not normal. People doping themselves to avoid life is not normal. Others nonchalantly walking past without a second thought or twinge of concern or empathy is not normal. Children swinging and laughing a single fence over while this heavy, dark energy is permeating is not normal. The fact this scene has become ordinary is so indicative of a crisis. I wish I knew what sector of the government to blame for this, but I fear this issue has grown roots deeper. I’ll bring this up to my peers, and sometimes I hear “their homelessness is a choice—if they wanted to, they could get a job” or “if I give them money, they’ll just spend it on more drugs,” and sure, addiction being a disease, they might, but I'm mostly left wondering what went so wrong that left so many in this position? What I feel is a combination of sadness, despair, and anger.
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This affect, the numbed despair and deep disappointment in society's failure to address human suffering in public space, is not new, but rather the contemporary form of a long-standing urban condition. Simmel wrote about the “blasé attitude” of city dwellers, a psychological defense against the constant bombardment of stimuli in the modern metropolis, arguing that urban life produces a kind of protective indifference, a dulling of emotional response necessary for psychic survival amid overwhelming novelty and scale. While Simmel was writing in 1903, his diagnosis feels eerily prescient today. We are still overwhelmed—not just by stimuli but by visible signs of decay, collapse, and abandonment– we can begin attributing this affect to urbanization.
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The opioid epidemic, the homelessness crisis, the visible effects of mass incarceration and disinvestment all have roots in earlier forms of systemic neglect and scapegoating, and are all undeniably racialized. The War on Drugs was a key part of that. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s intensification of the defunding of health services and the “War on Drugs” led to the criminalization rather than treatment of addiction, and according to The Sentencing Project, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses grew by over 1,000% from 1980 to 2000 (The Sentencing Project). The “War” wasn’t about solving the problem, it was about containing it, criminalizing it, and pushing it out of sight. Add to that decades of redlining, gentrification, and austerity urbanism, and the sight of people suffering on sidewalks becomes not an exception but a built-in feature of American cities.
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Crack cocaine, heavily used in poor, Black communities, was punished far more harshly than powder cocaine, which was more common among white users: “possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine, which was disproportionately consumed by African Americans, triggered an automatic five-year jail sentence — whereas 500 grams of powder cocaine, which was mostly consumed by richer, White demographics, merited the same punishment” (The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights). This wasn’t just policy, it was clear strategic political cruelty. As Michelle Alexander explains in The New Jim Crow, the criminal justice system became a replacement for Jim Crow-era racial control, turning poor addicts into prisoners instead of patients (Alexander). Now, after decades of punitive policy, we see the consequences: widespread addiction with little to no infrastructure for treatment, compassion, or reintegration. And I understand we have become exponentially more overstimulated by ever-more-urbanized life, but I am disappointed to see that this has resulted in essentially us forgoing our humanity. The historic failure to treat addiction as a medical and social issue has created a new kind of urban numbness, an everyday horror where despair becomes an ambient part of life.
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One work of contemporary culture that brings this affect into focus for me is Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” from his 2017 album DAMN. The song is angry and unapologetic over the frustration over Black identity in America being pathologized and criminalized, and on the second verse, when a Fox News clip plays mid-track, with Geraldo Rivera criticizing Kendrick's 2015 BET Awards performance and claiming that “hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years,” I felt the same anger and lump in my throat as I do seeing the victims in the park. But Kendrick doesn’t let that stand– he launches into the most aggressive part of the song, unleashing a blistering response at how absurd it is to blame the symptoms of systemic violence on the people suffering from it.
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I think about that when I see what I see in New York. When people say “homelessness is a choice,” or “they’ll just use the money for more drugs,” I hear Rivera’s voice—this ignorant and brutal refusal to look at the systems that created the problem. DNA. embodies what I imagine it must feel like to carry the weight of systems that hate you and still survive–that being said, I must say I acknowledge that I am writing this from a position of massive privilege, I will never understand what it truly feels like, but sitting with this feeling makes me question what responsibilities I have, as someone on the outside, to not look away, and what I could do other than act with intention and care. When Kendrick says, “I was born like this, since one like this, immaculate conception,” he’s forcing us to confront the idea that the violence he’s ‘inherited’ is coded into American history as much as it is into his own body. In that way, the song reminds me that despair and anger do exist together here, and that despair isn’t just sadness, it’s the boiling over of grief that has nowhere to go. That feeling I get walking through the park—eyes stinging, full of confusion and rage—gets sort of ‘answered’ by Kendrick’s defiance, his refusal to let society define him as a problem, and it becomes a kind of emotional anchor for me. He channels despair into something alive, loud, and unignorable, and to the best of my ability, that’s what I want to do, too.
Positive Affect:
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This affect is a visceral, corporeal, intimate, near-animal sensation of being so deeply in tune with your body that you can feel your organs moving, performing their bodily functions, and being overcome with gratitude for it. It’s neither clinical, repulsive, nor tinged with anxiety—it’s pleasurable, and really, deeply sacred. I feel it when I exhale all the air out of my lungs, clearing all my alveoli out so I can get clean, fresh air in. Or when I notice how my stomach shifts when I run or jump around. When I put my wrist below my head right as I’m falling asleep, I can hear my blood pulsing, and feel my muscle fibers unclenching after being tense. I think particularly as a woman, when I feel the hormonal and physical ebbs and flows of my cycle, I feel so grateful I can be so attuned to the vessel of my body: I feel like a biological miracle, like something ancient and alive and harmonic. I found my friends and I discussing this rather often these past few months; there is no more gratifying feeling than crying, feeling cleansed, perhaps a bit irrational too, but knowing it is because our cycles are approaching. What a magnificent attunement. I also recently discovered, from these friends, a word for the feeling when the monthly ovum leaves the ovary, initiating the luteal phase: mittelschmerz. Amazing! Imagine being so sensitive to your flesh that you can feel the variation of microscopic eggs leaving little bags full of your genetic material and potential future babies. And for some reason, you just know the cause of the momentary pain.
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In college, where we're so often cut off from ourselves—sleep-deprived, caffeinated, hunched over laptops, constantly online—these small, fleshy signals are precious. They ground me in the present. They remind me I am not a machine. And there is something politically potent in that: to be a young woman aware of her body not through critique or surveillance, but through love. This is not a dramatic euphoria, nor a cinematic high. It's quieter, steadier. It's knowing my stomach will grumble when I’ve been focused for too long. It’s feeling a cramp and drinking water like I’m tending to something sacred. It’s an affect of rhythm, of quiet aliveness, of being an animal in a world that often wants me to be a product.
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A work of contemporary culture I can bring this back to is the exhibition “Islandscapes” of Dieter Roth's work by the gallery Hauser and Wirth, who technically isn't a 21st century artist, but the concepts explored in the show led me onto another line of research. Roth often created installations made out of organic materials like fungus, feces, chocolate, and cheese, all to illustrate the concept of art mirroring the ephemerality of the humans who enjoy it. The piece Am Meer (By the sea), at the show I saw in February of this year, consisted of a grid of cones made out of sugar, from 1974, and by now, they had all become black and rotting. Some had fragmented, others completely crumbled, and no other artwork has ever evoked a more visceral feeling of decomposition in me than this. I became very interested in this type of corporeal, or biological art, and discovered Wynnie Mynerva, an artist who in 2023 surgically removed a piece of her ribcage for her show at the New Museum. What first drew me, other than the extremity of the act (done in collaboration with medical professionals), was the story behind it; how deeply she had responded to the Biblical myth of Eve being created from Adam’s rib. Mynerva, in her own words, was struck by the violence and passivity embedded in that origin story: woman as derivative, secondary, made from man. So, she turned the narrative inside out. By removing her own rib, she refused to be made from anyone else. It wasn’t a rejection of flesh, but a radical embrace of it. She made her body into the origin of her art, and in doing so, collapsed the distance between creator and created. That affect, the power of feeling your own organs, your skeleton, your biology, and claiming it as sacred, not shameful, radiated through her whole exhibition. She explained the power of being so deeply embodied you could feel the myth cracking open inside your own ribcage.
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But this affect I’ve described doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I think it is, in part, a response to a long, exhausting period of hyper-optimization and self-surveillance. The last decade especially has been saturated with wellness trackers, calorie counters, sleep monitors, period apps, all marketing themselves as tools for ‘knowing and bettering yourself.’ But in practice, this datafication of the body tends to end up alienating us from it. We start to feel like managers of our flesh, not inhabitants. In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about the ways the contemporary “ideal woman” is shaped by a constant need to self-surveil and improve, “always optimizing” (Tolentino 82). In the chapter “Always Be Optimizing,” she describes how this manifests in everything from exercise to emotional expression: the body as a project, not a presence–she described managing the body as an asset in a market framework rather than an embodied ‘tending to.’ But there is growing pushback. The cultural shift is subtle, but visible: people are deleting period apps for privacy reasons, ditching Fitbits, and turning toward embodied practices like somatic therapy or intuitive eating.
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Hard data backs this up. A 2023 study from Pew Research Center found that nearly 41% of U.S. adults had stopped using health tracking apps due to privacy concerns or the stress of over-monitoring their bodies (Pew Research Center, 2023). Similarly, a 2022 report by Deloitte found that Gen Z in particular is seeking more intuitive, non-digital wellness practices—preferring “gut feeling” and “body listening” over constant feedback loops. This move away from quantification reflects a hunger for precisely the kind of affect I’m describing: deep, internal, animal attunement. It is not just about rejecting the app, but reclaiming something older and more sacred. And this too has a history: The desire to feel one's body on its own terms stands in opposition to decades of material and pharmaceutical pressures designed to sever that connection, especially for women. In the 1950s and ’60s, as more women were ushered into suburban domestic life, there was a corresponding rise in the prescription of tranquilizers, dubbed ‘mother’s little helpers.’ Drugs like Miltown, Valium, and later Zoloft were heavily marketed to white housewives as tools to manage their anxiety and dissatisfaction, all while masking the systemic forces causing it. By the late 1970s, one in five American women was on a mood-altering prescription drug (Tone 189). These medications were often less about helping women understand or inhabit their bodies, and more about silencing them—literally muting internal sensations that signaled discomfort, rage, or longing.
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This legacy of pharmaceutical disconnection has lingered. Women’s pain is still systematically dismissed; many are conditioned to ignore or medicate away the very bodily signals I now find so grounding. So this affect—this extraordinary awareness of the body as a living, sacred system—isn’t just pleasant. It’s counter-cultural. It resists a long tradition of treating female embodiment as a problem to be managed or fixed. And it insists, quietly but powerfully, on presence.
Works Cited
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Deloitte. 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey: Striving for Balance, Advocating for Change. Deloitte Global, 2022, www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/work/2022-gen-z-millennial-survey.html.
"DNA." DAMN., composed by Kendrick Lamar and Michael Len Williams, 2017. Spotify app.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "It's Time to End the Racist and Unjustified Sentencing Disparity Between Crack and Powder Cocaine." The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 30 Nov. 2021, civilrights.org/blog/its-time-to-end-the-racist-and-unjustified-sentencing-disparity-between-crack-and-powder-cocaine/. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Pew Research Center. "The State of Health Tracking Technology." Pew Research Center, 2023, www.pewresearch.org.
The Sentencing Project. "Trends in U.S. Corrections." The Sentencing Project, 2022. https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/trends-in-u-s-corrections/
Simmel, Georg. "The Metropolis and Mental Life." The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, Free Press, 1950.
Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Random House, 2019.
Tone, Andrea. The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers. Basic Books, 2008.