The book is being published by Intellect Books. It will be an international publication. Intellect has already published books about trailblazers like David Cronenberg, David Lynch and some other amazing artists. To see their other titles check out their website http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/

I already know some awesome writers and cultural contributors who are planning on participating in this project. Please, feel free to repost this call for submissions anywhere as we are trying to reach as many people as possible with as many different perspectives.

The book will be called TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art

Below is the official call for contributors.

–Thank you
Nina

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Transgendered Canadian performance artist Nina Arsenault has been characterized as cyborg, intellectual, and artist. After sixty plastic surgeries to feminize and beautify her originally male body, Arsenault has become an icon for a new queer generation. Her stage plays, electronic presence through videos disseminated online, website, blog, social networking presentation sites, her print media writing, and her celebrity/nightclub appearances as well as writings about her life and work alternately objectify and subjectify her: she is both artist and work of art.

Rejecting the binary of real versus fake and dedicated to exploring authenticity, Arsenault’s work continues to examine the relationship of the omnipresent female self within the newly constructed female body, while critics, theorists and documentarians continue to engage in an examination of the artist as art.

TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work, Body of Art, to be published by Intellect Books Ltd, UK in 2012 will be edited by Judith Rudakoff. Included will be academic essays, critical response papers, popular media articles, Arsenault’s writing and colour photographs.

Submissions from the perspective of theatre, video, feminist theory, queer theory, gender studies, sexual diversity studies, performance studies, cultural studies, media studies, celebrity studies or any related areas are invited in the form of academic essays, critical response papers or popular media articles on topics which may include (but are not limited to):

· Longing and Belonging: Authenticity versus Realness

· Queer aesthetics: the art object as beautiful, erotic, satirical, subversive, comic, tragic, blashp
hemous and grotesque.

· Superstar reproduction: Nina Arsenault and the manufacturing of celebrity

· Double vision: The masculine gaze in the art of Nina Arsenault’s femininity.

· Transgressing acceptable trans-narratives: return to normative society or failed tragic queen

· The artist as art

· The intersections of vocal training and dramaturgy in the solo theatrical artist

· Arsenault’s self-portraiture in the digital age of self-representation and self-dissemination

· The democratization of social networking and the sexually discriminated artist: Arsenault’s Facebook site as installation.

· Palatable empathies: Narratives of Nina Arsenault’s transformation on television and in the theatre

· Titillation, ornamentation and the ritualized body: The art of geisha vs. the transsexual gay nightlife hostess

· Mythology vs pathology: a crossroads for the queer artist?

· Chasing the Real from inside the labyrinth of postmodern deconstructivism(s)

· Blasphemous iconography: creating art that complicates the world instead of trying to save it.

· Heretic transmissions: Nina Arsenault and the politics of the right and the left

Please direct all proposals and queries to Judith Rudakoff, Editor at infoninabook@gmail.com on or before September 30 2010. Essays, papers and articles selected for publication (subject to final peer review) must be received on or before February 1 2011.

For academic essays selected for publication, reading copies of Silicone Diaries or I Was Barbie will be made available for consultation.

Proposals of up to 500 words (academic essays) and up to 250 words (critical response papers or popular media articles) should be accompanied by a brief biographical statement (in Microsoft Word .doc or .rtf format) and covering email note should include your name, any affiliation, preferred email contact information. Academic essays should be between 3000-5000 words and critical response papers and popular media articles should be between 500-1500 words.

Prospective contributors may consider source material such as but not exclusive to:

· The Silicone Diaries, stage play

· I Was Barbie, stage play

· “Glamour Crack”, series of videos produced by Nina Arsenault http://www.youtube.com/user/venusmachina

· Video representation of Nina Arsenault on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/ninaarsenault· Nina Arsenault’s website and blog: www.ninaarsenault.com

· T Girl columns for Fab Magazine (archived electronically at http://www.fabmagazine.com/archive.html)

· Publicity Archive (up to December 2009), housed in Clara Thomas Special Collections and Archives, Scott Library, York University, Toronto, Ontario. (File TPC 220)

· Club/party hosting, celebrity appearances as Nina Arsenault

· Appearances as fictional characters (Barbie at L’Oreal Fashion Week 2009 in Toronto, Jessica Rabbit)

· Television appearances in Canada (including The Jon Dore Show (Comedy Network), Kink (Showcase), Train 48 (Global), Fashion Television and Sex Matters (CITY)

A brief mention of when I performed an excerpt of I was Barbie at the Summerworks launch party at the beginning of June. I will be performing the whole play at Summerworks Aug 5-15th, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. )go to summerworks.ca for tix!)

“I missed Nina Arsenault’s sold-out, critically acclaimed sensation The Silicone Diaries at Buddies this year simply because the show sold out, twice I believe, before I even had time to coordinate my schedule. Now I understand why. Arsenault is a divine, engaging, beguiling and enchanting story teller. She performs a new work, i was Barbie, at the Festival this summer and I think it may be the first show that I rush to see. I am entirely enamoured of her. I could listen to her talk all day.”

from http://www.twisitheatreblog.com/2010/06/is-it-summerworks-yet.html

“Religion, ritual, and art began as one and a religious or metaphysical element is still present in al art. Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality… Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature’s daemonic energy in a moment of perpetual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as stasis, fixation as obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line across a page is trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act.

Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind, or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality. Moral themes may be present, but they are incidental, simply grounding an art work in a particular time and place… Particularly in modern times, when high art has been shoved to the periphery of culture, it is evident that art is aggressive and compulsive. The artist makes art not to save humankind but to save himself. Every benevolent remark by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.”

–Camille Paglia, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art” from inside Sexual Personae, 1990

“My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, mercialess battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Within me are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God –and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.

The anguish has been intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. I have fought to reconcile these two primordial forces which are so contrary to each other, to make them realize that they are not enemies but, rather, fellow workers, so that they might rejoice in their harmony –and so that I might rejoice with them.

Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and shortlived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.”

–Nikos Kazantzakis, The Prologue to The Last Temptation of Christ, 1960

SHOW TIMES AND DATES BELOW…

GO TO WWW.SUMMERWORKS.CA FOR TIX!!!

I was Barbie is my second solo performance piece. It’s my real life story of representing Mattel’s beloved plastic doll at her official 50th birthday party and the opening night of L’Oreal Fashion Week – a spiritual portrait of a glittering, digitally commodified, high society world with lots of (Canadian) celebrity gossip! Award winning theatre maker Brendan Healy directs.

I was Barbie is playing at the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto (Aug 5-15th).

DATE TIME
August 5th …………… 4:00 PM
August 6th …………… 10:00 PM
August 8th …………… 6:00 PM
August 9th …………… 8:00 PM
August 12th ………….. 6:00 PM
August 14th ………….. 2:00 PM
August 15th ………….. 8:00 PM

VENUE: Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace

FOR TICKETS GO TO SUMMERWORKS.CA

(This article was originally published in The Harold Times, the Fringe Theatre Festival of Toronto newspaper, on Monday, July 5th, 2010. The Harold Times is a small publication primarily distributed at fringe theatre venues and its main readership is theatre artists and people who have a special interest in alternative live performance. FYI- This piece is not a manifesto. It is a series of reflections.)

13 reflections from an unreal queer artist
by Nina Arsenault

1.
When I see theatre I see almost exclusively queer theatre now. I usually feel uncomfortable waiting for the lights to go down at non-queer shows. I understand that theatre spaces try to be inclusive. Still, I feel stared at and judged. No offense.

2.
I also do not have TV or internet in my home. I found most television programs repellent. The internet would consume my time. I got rid of them two years ago. Occasionally, I rent films.

3.
But, queer performance is mostly what I see. The pieces are usually radically different in form and content. This does not make it “challenging” to experience the works.

4.
I ask myself how to structure a new piece of performance? What is the paradigm for its form? Stylistic qualities? I am already forgetting what normative dramatic forms are. They aren’t what is normal to me anymore.

5.
Not knowing what else to do I work from obsession.

6.
I do not begin making performance to correct a social wrong. I am not trying to make the world a better place. I can not justify my creativity with a simple political statement. I haven’t tried to get an art grant.

7.
I know it is painful not to create. It is painful for my expressions not to be witnessed. It is painful not to have interflow with other creators.

8.
Having no TV or internet has intensified (and rarefied) my need to create and connect.

9.
I recently explored and saw a word based play with a linear structure. A dramatic arch with no digressions. Delineated characters with clear intentions. The characters had their feet firmly on the ground, maintained eye contact while talking with each other and had no generalized anxiety. Everyone so sure of themselves. The play, itself, had also had a singular accessible political message. I was fascinated by it. I was quite surprised the audience could accept this representation of reality as “real.” It was so unreal to me, so shockingly alien.

10.
In a talk-back after the show the audience and charismatic cast joyfully agreed with each other about the meaning(s) of the work. Some audience members offered suggestions about how the work could be changed to offer a political statement they would be even more comfortable with. An artist took notes. This was very affirming.

11.
I stayed at a hotel recently. After two years away from TV I found it mesmerizing. I enjoyed that it told me exactly where to look. What to notice. Where the story was going. What the characters were thinking. The message. The meaning. The score told me what to feel. The images, the pace, the rhythm told me what moments were important, more important, most important. For me, it was a sublime experience of being thought controlled. My moment to moment reality was so focused. Such order was hypnotic. It was a far more compelling experience than theatre that was telling me what to think, although after a few hours I began to resent the manipulation. Because I began to notice the machinations through which I was being controlled I felt my cognitive sophistication was being underestimated. I felt belittled.

12.
Although, I continued to be fascinated by many moments of family dramas, crime shows, hospitals –fragmented disconnected moments of straight actors/characters/people possessing stillness as they spoke. Not fidgeting. Holding eye contact. Their voices were easy-going yet also revealed their emotions. So casually. I want to believe that the way straight people behave in the privacy of their domestic relationships, homes and at work is very advanced. They are incredible performers (when I am not around?)

13.
I began to watch news casters and entertainment-tabloid television. I liked the way these announcers talked even more. I first experienced them as automaton-like. Then, I noticed that these robots seemed more like the real life people that I deal with. More real even than the reality show actors. Their voices illustrate what they are feeling. I also sensed that they are inferring what I should be feeling, what they want me to be feeling. They are so confident, so charming, so buoyant, so joyful that I could find little room for disagreement. I agreed to feel what I should have been feeling, what was charismatically implied I should be feeling. It was very comfortable and perhaps artificial (which is not a bad thing for me.) I am not surprised that I can accept this representation of reality as real.

Nina Arsenault is a writer, theatre maker, media artist, aesthete and transsexual cyborg. Check out her website www.ninaarsenault.com

“What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should… the lamp or the house be an art object…, but not our life?”

~Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”

(thanks to my collaborator Brendan Healy for making me aware of this quote)

(The following is my speech from Pride Prom, held at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, produced by the Triangle Program and SOY (Saving Our Youth). The Pride Prom is an annual prom in Toronto for LGBTQ and Questioning youth and their friends. It gives them a chance to come to a prom with same sex dates, be outrageously queer and there is a Prom Queen, King and Ace. The Ace is for anyone not comfortable identifying as a king or a queen.)

Thank you for having me here today. I want to welcome you all to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. I believe that usually when we come to the theatre we come to watch characters onstage, people, have experiences and to watch them transform as they have experiences. And as we sit in the darkness in the audience, hopefully, we can let our hearts open. Maybe we let our hearts open just a little bit. And, if we let this happen it can be really quite amazing to watch people transform. It can also be very moving to realize that we are all on a journey that is unfolding in front of us. I think that is one of the things that makes the theatre a very magical place. When it lets us see that.

Tonight, I am very privileged that I get to speak to you at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre at the Pride Prom. As you graduate from high school. It’s my hope that you are enjoying the moments of this time in your life. Because this is a time of transition for you I expect it will also be a time of transformation for each of you. I encourage you to let your hearts open, just a little bit. You are witnessing everyone’s transformation and your own.

It can be very exciting to watch the Theatre of our Own Lives as it unfolds.

The Theatre of my Own Life has been very exciting for me.

I went to high school in a very small town in rural Ontario. When I was there I was a very effeminate person in a boy-body, and I hope things have changed in that small town for young queer people, and I know that they have.

One of the things that comes to my mind when I think back to my high school is that it was a kind of theatre, too. It was a very small high school so there were people watching other people’s lives unfold. In fact, we were all witnessing each other’s lives. Commenting about it. Talking about it. Getting caught up in the drama.

Sometimes people could say some very negative things about each other.

I did everything I could to perform well there. I performed very well in class. I was a “straight” A student. And, I performed very well after class in the drama club. I performed very well in our school’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I liked performing very much, and I suppose I was known for it in my high school.

I also made sure to perform very well in the hallways, and in the cafeteria and after school. In between classes I made sure that I guarded my impulses and didn’t do anything inappropriate for my small town high school in the 80’s. Don’t be too effeminate. Don’t be too flamboyant. Don’t be too creative. Definately don’t be too creative. Don’t be sexual in any way around straight people. I performed that very well.

I wanted to be liked. I wanted to have friends and be accepted. So, I performed very well whenever other kids were watching me which was pretty much all the time in the Theatre of my High School. It was very challenging for me to always be performing, but it paid off because I got to survive.

But in a way I made an unspoken deal with some of the other people at my school. I would perform in certain ways and not in others ways if they would accept me. And they agreed to this agreement, too.

But once I made that unspoken deal with people they could be very critical of what I was performing and how I was performing. In fact, almost everyone was a critic. Everyone had an opinion.

Some people complained I was too artistic. Others said, “Why can’t you just let yourself be as artistic as you want to be?” Some said I was too unusual. Others said, “Why can’t you just embrace the fact that you are unusual. Most people said I was too effeminate. Others said, “Why can’t you just get over the fact that you’re effeminate and stop caring what other people think?” I was too proud. Not proud enough. Too forceful. Not forceful enough.

There was always something wrong with my performance. It was never good enough, and the criticism came form both sides.

Sometimes the most painful criticism of what I was doing was, “Why can’t you just be real? Why can’t you be the real you?”

It’s very hard to be real inside that kind of theatre. With an audience always judging.

(pause)

I always used to think that if I was famous everyone would accept me. Once I was famous people would really want to get to know the real me. I was really looking forward to being the real me. In a way, I wanted to perform the real me.

I don’t think that to perform is only to be fake. After all, we perform daily actions. We perform brushing our teeth. We perform carrying out the garbage. We perform actions. We perform saying hello.

Hello.

I do my best to perform as well as I can.

(pause) Yes, there´s more…. »

(I delivered the following speech, Metaphysical Object, at IdeaCity on July 16th, 2010. IdeaCity is an inspirational conference that brings together innovative minds in the arts, science, culture and many areas of achievement. As I spoke a slide show of my photographic images played behind and at the sides of me.)

I heard a bit of a chuckle when they brought out my faery furniture.

Sometimes I like to think of myself as a good faery who has messed around with black magic.

I am going to do something very un-ladylike. I am going to sit and talk to you today with my legs spread because this helps me feel the most receptive to you, and I want to be receptive to you. This position also helps me feel the most penetrative, and I also want to penetrate you. Your mind.

I think stories of transformation and empowerment are sacred. But, our culture is obsessed with transformation and empowerment. That’s what sells. That’s what people tune in for. Stories of transformation and empowerment are conceptualized, marketed, pre-packaged, commercialized for mass audiences, edited into stories of transformation and empowerment. I know because its been done to me, I’ve done it, both in scripted television and reality tv where they edit you into a storyline of transformation and empowerment, produced shows, applauded, praised, emulated. Transformation and empowerment have been so pervasive I find it suffocating.

My name is Nina Arsenault. I am very grateful to be able to share a few of my ideas with you today. They are the ideas that I currently am working with.

As you can see some of my photographic work will be playing on the screen behind as I speak. I know that in 2010 our minds can absorb multiple simultaneous streams of information at any one time even if the streams of ideas are new to us, provocative, and sexual, so I know you will be able to keep up.

I am an artist who has had 60 cosmetic surgeries and procedures. The redesign of my body took 8 years and was an arduous and thrilling creative project full of both suffering and ecstasy for me. I have created autobiographical writing about these experiences in the National Post and Fab Magazine, two live theatre performances based on my real life experiences, The Silicone Diaries and I was Barbie, art videos, and I make photography of myself. I also make appearances on TV, in other media and at nightlife events I’ve impersonated Jessica Rabbit and I was hired to represent Barbie, the much loved plastic doll at Mattel’s official 50th birthday party in Toronto and the opening night of L’Oreal Fashion Week. I consider these appearances as part of my art practise. I also consider my facebook and youtube pages as part of my art practise. As a member of a sexual minority who is discriminated against, although I am sometimes revered and treated as sacred, but as a sexual minority who is discriminated against, and as an artist who considers herself radical, the democratization of social media has been invaluable for me to create, exhibit and disseminate my work and my ideas.

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.

By the way, I usually do not believe in responding to my critics, but I want you to hear my truth today, the truth of my life the way I see it, with an open heart and an open mind. So I want to say very briefly that I know there are people in culture who think they know the truth of my life better than I do –certain medical authorities, gender theorists, psychologists and even certain feminist academics who think they have more objective vision and years of research which they must defend to maintain their positions of power.

I know that my ideas of objectification or the idea of treating a woman’s body as an object are not new ideas and they are not even my ideas.

I’ve objectified my body in many ways. I took the idea that I had a soul and put it on a shelf and looked at my body in terms of line, mass, form and structure. Then, I made it into an object again when I began its redesign. Then I put an animate substance inside me, silicone, so there are parts are me that are literally object. Then I took photography and video of my objectified body.

All of my ideas existed in culture already. It’s everywhere –on every television station, on every magazine rack, in every historical era of art objects have been made of women’s bodies –realistic and imagined, in movies, magazines, online and in pornography. You are probably already inundated with the objectification of women’s bodies. They are everywhere. I guess if there is anything original about what I have done I have allowed the ideas into my body, and I am allowing my body to be a channel, a medium to explore the ideas. But, that isn’t even original because lots of women are doing that. If there is a single thing I do that’s even remotely original it’s that there’s not a man doing it to me and profiting off it. It’s just me. Well, lots of women are profiting off of it. If there is one things I do that is original and blasphemous it is that I have spoken about the objectification of my body without shame and without a tone that says “I’m just being superficial.”

After all, if it is happening everywhere shouldn’t someone be giving it serious artistic and intellectual thought? When I read most intellectual writing about beauty and the objectification of women, it is a call to arms. We must stop objectifying women. We need to learn that everything and everyone is beautiful.

It’s a beautiful politic.

(pause) Yes, there´s more…. »