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180 pages

English

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A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

After sixty surgeries at a cost of almost $200,000 to feminize and beautify her originally male body, transgendered Canadian artist Nina Arsenault has created a body of work emanating from her experiences that includes photographs, videos disseminated online, a website, a blog, several social networking presentation sites, stage plays, print media writing and performance of the body in both celebrity appearances and daily public life. Arsenault was born in rural Ontario in 1974 and until the age of six lived as Rodney in a trailer park with her working-class family. Her father delivered bread.

Introduction – Judith Rudakoff

Part I: The Texts

Chapter 1: Affirming Identity with Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyborg – Sky Gilbert

Chapter 2: Unreal Beauty: Identification and Embodiment in Nina Arsenault’s “Self-Portraits” – J. Paul Halferty

Chapter 3: Daughter of the Air: Three Acting Sessions and Nina Arsenault’s Imaginary Body – Cynthia Ashperger

Chapter 4: Nina, Amber and the Evolution of a Commodified Sexual Being – Todd Klinck

Chapter 5: Sexed Life is a Cabaret: The Body Politics of Nina Arsenault’s The Silicone Diaries – Frances J. Latchford

Chapter 6: Chopping at the Sexy Bits: [Trans]cending the Body with Surgical Conundrums – J Mase III

Chapter 7: Nina Arsenault: Fast Feminist Objet a – Shannon Bell

Chapter 8: T he Artist as Complication: Nina Arsenault and the Morality of Beauty – Alistair Newton

Chapter 9: Landscape with Yukon and Unnatural Beauty – Nina Arsenault

Chapter 10: Performing the Prosthetics of Femininity: Nina Arsenault’s Transsexual Body as a Living Art Object – Benjamin Gillespie

Chapter 11: Compelling Honesty: Searching for Authenticity in the Voice of Nina Arsenault – Eric Armstrong

Chapter 12: Live in Your Blood: A Fragmentary Response to Nina Arsenault’s Holy Theatre and Spiritual Gift – Shimon Levy

Chapter 13: St. Nina and the Abstract Machine: Aesthetics, Ontology, Immanence – David Fancy

Part II: THE SILICONE DIARIES

Director’s Note – Brendan Healy

The Silicone Diaries – Nina Arsenault

Part III: The Photographs

Sujets

Energie & environnement

Théâtre

Éducation

Cultural Studies

General

Engineering

Education

Technology

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Performance art

Live Art

History of art

Theatre

Sciences et techniques

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Performing Arts

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Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	03 juillet 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841506951
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2012 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
Front cover photo: Tony Fong Back cover photo of Nina Arsenault: inkedKenny
Back cover photo of Judith Rudakoff: Christopher Gentile
Editor: Judith Rudakoff
Associate Editor: J. Paul Halferty
Editorial Assistant: Carina Gaspar
ISBN 978-1-84150-571-8 eISBN 978-1-84150-695-1
Printed and bound by Latimer Trend, UK.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Judith Rudakoff
Part I: The Texts
Chapter 1: Affirming Identity with Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyborg
Sky Gilbert
Chapter 2: Unreal Beauty: Identification and Embodiment in Nina Arsenault’s “Self-Portraits”
J. Paul Halferty
Chapter 3: Daughter of the Air: Three Acting Sessions and Nina Arsenault’s Imaginary Body
Cynthia Ashperger
Chapter 4: Nina, Amber and the Evolution of a Commodified Sexual Being
Todd Klinck
Chapter 5: Sexed Life is a Cabaret: The Body Politics of Nina Arsenault’s The Silicone Diaries
Frances J. Latchford
Chapter 6: Chopping at the Sexy Bits: [Trans]cending the Body with Surgical Conundrums
J Mase III
Chapter 7: Nina Arsenault: Fast Feminist Objet a
Shannon Bell
Chapter 8: The Artist as Complication: Nina Arsenault and the Morality of Beauty
Alistair Newton
Chapter 9: Landscape with Yukon and Unnatural Beauty
Nina Arsenault
Chapter 10: Performing the Prosthetics of Femininity: Nina Arsenault’s Transsexual Body as a Living Art Object
Benjamin Gillespie
Chapter 11: Compelling Honesty: Searching for Authenticity in the Voice of Nina Arsenault
Eric Armstrong
Chapter 12: Live in Your Blood: A Fragmentary Response to Nina Arsenault’s Holy Theatre and Spiritual Gift
Shimon Levy
Chapter 13: St. Nina and the Abstract Machine: Aesthetics, Ontology, Immanence
David Fancy
Part II: THE SILICONE DIARIE S
Director’s Note
Brendan Healy
The Silicone Diaries
Nina Arsenault
Part III: The Photographs
Image Credits
Acknowledgements
This book was made possible by the enthusiastic participation and support of Nina Arsenault. Associate Editor J. Paul Halferty offered perspective and insight and Editorial Assistant Carina Gaspar shared a keen eye for detail. I would further like to acknowledge and thank Myles Warren for his constructive comments and encouragement, and Serena Dessen, Brian Fawcett, and Hilary Sherman for their input. York University’s Theatre Department Administrative Assistant Mary Pecchia and Undergraduate Program Assistant Rachel Katz provided administrative support with good humour and kindness.
I thank York University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies for funding my graduate assistant, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for contributing to the project through their Small Grant program.
Introduction
Judith Rudakoff
After sixty surgeries at a cost of almost $200,000 to feminize and beautify her originally male body 1 (see Figure 22), transgendered Canadian artist Nina Arsenault has created a body of work emanating from her experiences that includes photographs, videos disseminated online, a website, a blog, several social networking presentation sites, stage plays, print media writing, and performance of the body in both celebrity appearances and daily public life. 2
Arsenault was born in rural Ontario in 1974 and until the age of six lived as Rodney (see Figure 27) in a trailer park with her working-class family. Her father delivered bread for a large company, and her mother was a homemaker. In 1980, when her father’s income increased, the family moved to a house. In high school, Arsenault came out to close friends as a gay man, and then declared her sexual orientation publicly on the first day of university at a freshman event.
All in all, Arsenault experienced a comfortable, reasonable beginning. But throughout her early years, Arsenault was also developing a need to externally manifest an internal yearning to express her feminine self and do so unreasonably by embodying extreme and even unreal representations of Western beauty. 3 By rejecting the binary of real versus fake and dedicating herself to exploring authenticity and beauty, Arsenault today continues to evolve in a process that began in childhood with an awareness of her transsexuality, continued in adulthood with surgical steps 4 towards Male-to-Female transition 5 and beautification, and now anticipates new challenges in midlife and beyond that will include physical and psychological responses to biological aging as well as unknown effects from the un-encased silicone that has been directly injected into the muscle tissue of her body.
Arsenault is her body of work. Whether in conventional performance situations—one of the aspects of Arsenault’s practice that distinguishes her from many other transsexual performers is her commitment to telling her own stories 6 —or on view buying a coffee at the local corner store, she represents and interrogates the relationship between the female self and the constructed feminine body, as critics and scholars from a diversity of disciplines, spectators, fans, and curious bystanders observe and engage. 7
Only some of Arsenault’s surgeries were essential to her transition. 8 The rest were cosmetic procedures that addressed her yearning to be beautiful (see Figures 11 top and bottom, 19, and 25 top and bottom).
Arsenault’s embodiment of the feminine form exceeds and defies heteronormative expectation while simultaneously emulating aspects of white, Western culture’s most popular beauty models (see Figure 28). Arsenault’s relationship to these icons is on the level of form: she embraces their aesthetics and representations of femininity and beauty, rather than enacting the role or persona of each physical model.
Arsenault asserts, “my work explores culturally constructed ideas of maleness and femaleness as well as notions of ‘realness’ and ‘fakeness.’ I see myself exploring femininity as an artistic form, a body that can be inhabited and performed. And most of all, I explore my body as an object, an art object.” 9
In her work, Arsenault confronts unanswerable questions emanating from the fake versus real conundrum. What is the relationship between a source that is true to nature and a heightened or modified representation of it? If a subject is real but modified, is the subject then fake? If a subject is unreal, is an accurate photographic image of it real? Does interpretation affect the authenticity of an image? How does interpretation differ from manipulation and artifice?
The only possible answer to all of these questions: Arsenault’s enactment and inter- pretation of femaleness and femininity are simultaneously real and fake.
While Arsenault’s surgically altered body represents an impressive feminine form (see Figure 17), and she has chosen to undergo an orchiectomy (surgical castration), 10 she has eschewed full gender reassignment surgery: she retains her penis (see Figures 16 and 30). This choice is, perhaps more than anything else, an embodiment of the subversive aesthetic she has adopted 11 and is part of her daily performance of an unorthodox, individualized concept of the feminine. Despite her current commitment to keeping her penis, she continues to examine the ramifications of this decision:
So much life force from inside me seems to come from my genitals. So much sensation. Sensation that is distinctly in male shape. This fucks up my ability to be in the moment but also feels like an enlivening force within me. Do I need to learn to accept my male genitals? To be comfortable with them?
I don’t know if I should look to escape the sensation of being male to lose more inner life (how much more?) or risk it all? To be a doll? Would I objectify myself into an automaton? Would I be happier like that? Is that what I really want? 12
Arsenault’s radical choices go far beyond the decision to retain her penis. She has sculpted and altered her form to a degree that it has become a hyperfeminized interpretation of a human body (see Figure 12). In her photographic collaborations as well as in the multitudes of quasi-candid images of her—she is always aware of the lens—that populate social media sites such as Facebook, she is adept at posing and positioning her body to emphasize its proportions (see Figures 1 and 12).
Arsenault frankly evaluates her body modifications, “there’s an avantgarde aesthetic to my body, because I have a body that’s not like most.” 13 She grapples daily with the reality of being part flesh and blood, part silicone and synthetic implants, and with viewers’ reactions to and readings of her unnatural body:
[M]y body is not a human body, an animal body, anymore but a bunch of visual symbols, cues, like I’m a walking series of semiotics. I’m an image of a woman, a reflection of one in a Hall of Mirrors.
My body is part assemblage, part masquerade. 14
As Arsenault delves further into performing the body and exploring the self as art object, investigation of the differences between her biological and manufactured body parts necessarily inform her ongoing acting and voice study. 15
The deeper I go into my work I realize more profoundly how artificial I am. My body—not the external image of me, but my body—the sensations I feel, the sensations I am in dialogue with tell me with each breath w