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)

(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…. »

Peter Tamlin is a young photographer that I think is extremely talented, and we will be seeing a lot more of his stuff in the future in high profile ventures I am sure…

He explained to me that for each shoot he tries to capture one exquisite image instead of aiming for narrative or series.

Check out his awesome photography at petertamlin.com

The shoot actually took place in a blizzard. I was two hours late showing up to the set because I was trapped in the snow. So, this shot was captured at 2am. I was freezing cold cause Iantha the make-up artist had to spray my body with Pam, the cooking oil, over top the body paint to get the slick effect on my skin…and all I was wearing was the dress that Peter had constructed out of industrial latex in a van…

For me this image is about the tension between a sociopathic gaze and an aesthetic vision.

…below is the image in its actual enormous size and a detail shot of the face. (You have to click on the little dot to see the face detail.)

me performing as Jessica Rabbit at the tranny strip club where I used to work (2007)…

…”real men” (a detective) lusting after a cartoon woman in Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit…

…photos of me modelling as Jessica Rabbit for anatomy artists at the Cameron House (2007). FYI- the dress is very painful to wear because of how small the corset makes my waist, and the sequins dig into my flesh.

When these were taken I clashed with Nakai Theatre’s photographer Omaar Reyna because I didn’t want to be photographed without a flash (which glamourizes its subject by blowing out details and flaws with light). But, now I love the production shots from the Yukon production of The Silicone Diaries. Taken in the stage’s light without any digital manipulation, I think these images reveal signs of my body’s disparate flesh and silicone, my masculine and feminine features, as well as strength, fragility, strain, 36 years of age, flaws and beauty.

These are the original shots from my Xtra! shoot without digital treatements. The idea was simply to come in at the beginning of the shoot completely made up, and one by one remove the accoutrements of my appearance. In the final shot I am just wearing a bit of Chapstick on my lips.

Photographed by freelance Toronto photographer Paula Wilson. The concept for the shoot came from me. Big thanks to Gordon Bowness for organizing the shoot, to Nicholas Flood for assisting and to Xtra! mag for giving me the opportunity to express myself in a meaningful way.

The cover of Canada’s national Gay and Lesbian news source. There is an inside story about the upcoming Buddies in Bad Times production of The Silicone Diaries. The story is written by Chris Dupuis.

“DECONSTRUCTING BEAUTY. In her autobiographical theatre piece The Silicone Diaries, Nina Arsenault looks at the pain and joys of chasing her unique ideal of womanhood.” Go to xtr.ca to read the full story…

Thanks Xtra! for their interest in me and my work.

I just did a cover shoot for the Nov 5th issue of Xtra! Magazine, Canada’s national Gay and Lesbian News Source. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and I can’t wait for people to see it!

This is the entire photo essay, called Mannequin, that Hamish Kippen and I worked on for Fresh magazine’s Sept 2007 issue. I consider myself very fortunate for having had the opportunity to work with him. After the jump is the accompanying text I wrote for the images.

Yes, there´s more…. »

Hamish Kippen was a fabulous photographer who died last year. I never got to know him personally, but I loved collaborating with him.

Hamish Kippen

I knew him as talented, inspired and easy going. He was already making a name for himself, and I was sure he would one day be shooting for glamourous fashion magazines.

In his all-too-short career Hamish Kippen not only displayed to the world his unique vision of beauty but he also developed an exceptional way of communicating with and through his subjects.

image by Kippen and Arsenault, 2007

If you knew Hamish or his work please join us in celebrating Hamish’s incredible life and work at a gallery exhibit of his spectacular photographs. The exhibition will run from October 2 to 31, 2009 (including Nuit Blanche), and will be held at The Great Hall Gallery, 1087 Queen Street West (at Dovercourt), Toronto.

A book featuring his beautiful work will be published this fall by Hamish’s family and friends and will be launched with the exhibition.