Plastic fantastic: Nina Arsenault’s one-woman play The Silicone Diaries deals with her pursuit of extreme beauty, a quest that has involved over 60 surgeries and has taken her from mere mortal to near cyborg
by Sasha
“My art is not created from a place where I’m trying to make the world a better place,” said transsexual writer and performer Nina Arsenault at Moses Znaimer’s ideaCity in Toronto earlier this year. “My art is not created from a place where I’m trying to ease the suffering of other women. In fact, my work complicates the world. My work complicates the suffering of other women.”
Arsenault, who was born in small-town Ontario, grew up in a trailer park and briefly taught at York University, was 24 when she began sexual reassignment surgery. She has said she pursued her operations “with a kind of athleticism”—an apt description, given that she would have up to six at a time, occasionally under extremely dodgy circumstances. In actualizing the hectic, extravagant femininity she calls her art, she has wilfully joined the ranks of women who have pursued beauty to an extreme degree.
She speaks frankly about these feminizing injections and surgeries in her play The Silicone Diaries, which opens in Montreal at la Chapelle this week and chronicles how she turned herself from an awkward man into a bombshell with measurements that seem almost supernatural: 36D-26-40. Many of the treatments she underwent—she’s endured over 60 operations in total—are illegal in North America. She travelled south to have them administered, occasionally in motel rooms, once, as she recounts, receiving silicone injections from a 7-Up bottle procured from a closet. These earthy, tumbledown anecdotes, which make up her one-woman play The Silicone Diaries, had critics floored during the run in Toronto and provide a dramatic contrast to their outcome: Arsenault’s quest for the feminine has taken her beyond mere mortal and into cyborg territory. “We don’t live natural lives,” she says. “We live in a modern technological society and that is where I will seek to empower myself and that is where I will seek to find pleasure. There is a white noise around beauty. People will reward you for it.” Arsenault represents a very contemporary beauty ideal—a must-have-it-all-to-get-it-all compilation of female signifiers: her breasts are taut and unsinkable, her lips GMO succulent, her nose a filbert-sized ski slope, her eyes wide as a doe’s, her skin creaseless and tawny. “But I’m not contemporary,” she says with serene resignation. “I’m already outdated. This look peaked in the early 2000s.”
PORNYWOOD
The “look” to which she refers can be summed up in a portmanteau: Pornywood. Jenna Jameson and Pamela Anderson would be two women who have also sculpted themselves to similar effect. Arsenault says she was aware of the fact—that her choices and the technologies she used to satisfy them would soon be outdated—the moment she began her surgeries in pursuit of irreproachable beauty. That some day, as she says, science would enable women to attain larger breasts through stem cell technology and that implants would become antiquated and, yes, repugnant objects of curiosity.
“Look at her,” says Arsenault, imagining the conversations orbiting her in coming years. “She’s one of those old silicone queens. Back in the day, doctors cut her open and put things inside of her.” She knows about these things because her entire life has been dedicated to beauty and how it can be achieved artificially. Arsenault knew from a very young age that she wanted to be a woman and her early surgeries were aimed at this goal. It was only later that she began the ones that have made her so iconic.
Many of us are in similar pursuit—“The Hunt” as Arsenault calls it—but Arsenault uses herself, to both stunning and ruthless effect, as a canvas. To maintain the quality of her creation, she has become an expert on methodologies past, present and future. She feels great affinity to those who have also taken up painstaking artifice as a spiritual quest, all the while knowing the results may be devastating.
“I understand Geisha cross-culturally and perhaps I am exotifying them,” she states. “But I experience them as extraordinarily beautiful.”
To some, this may seem an improbable correlation. Arsenault’s history as a sex worker, which she touches on keenly in Diaries, would put her in the class of courtesan. Look a little deeper, though, and you will see the connection. Geisha dedicate their lives to their form—early Geisha were even left ravaged by the effects of their lead-based make-up—knowing that what they do puts them in a category that alienates and is revered in equal measures. “Our culture is really schizophrenic when it comes to beauty,” says Arsenault.
The woman that Arsenault chose to exemplify has already had her heyday. Now ahead of her is the not so simple task of living with this choice (one that involves a beauty designed to engender envy and awe) with unfaltering self-acceptance.
NATURE, DNA, SPALDING GRAY
One might say that Arsenault’s presentation of female beauty is one that has obvious overtones of oppressive male desire and that she chose as her target audience the most fickle and cruel critics. Who is the woman Arsenault embodies inside, the one who has created this exterior that leaves her so vulnerable to such misogynistic whims?
In the ’90s, French performance artist ORLAN had a series of plastic surgeries to transform herself into various beauty ideals throughout the ages. Her goal was to acquire flawless beauty as envisioned by male artists; she later described the work as a “struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned)”.
Arsenault is following a similar path and these same themes are explored in Diaries. The women Arsenault describes in the play are also seeking improbable beauty, but theirs is done for pure self-pleasure rather than cultural or scholarly exploration. In recounting her own journey wrestling with the innate, the programmed and DNA, Arsenault looks to late American monologist Spalding Gray.
Gray was skilled at the art of the red herring confessional, of the “what you are seeing is really me, but it is also not really me.” This is also Arsenault’s greatest talent, as suggested by the title of the show itself.
“He had such incredible precision, dignity and calmness,” she says of Gray. “He suffered from intense anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and to get on stage and be grounded and tell his story was a task of dedication and bravery on his part.
“I had a lot of things about my experiences that I wanted to express, but I knew that they were provocative and I knew there would be people who would contest them. So to be able to stand onstage, moment by moment and not shrink from the real life experience of it, to not apologize for it or make it palatable to everyone, to speak my own truth from a place of grounded-ness, for me Spalding Gray was mesmerizing in that way. He took the form of storytelling to such a high art form.”
“I am not a normal ‘woman trapped inside a man’s body,’’’ Arsenault has said. “This cultural soundbite does not begin to encompass the complexity of my experience.”