(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…. »

Thie following is from the Toronto Star. To view the article on their site CUT AND PASTE THE FOLLOWING LINK:

http://www.thestar.com/living/article/822008–sexy-transsexual-nina-arsenault-on-life-art-and-her-penis

by Jim Rankin, Staff Reporter (photos also by Jim Rankin)

This won’t be a narrative about a girl trapped inside the body of an awkward boy from Beamsville, who went through 60 plastic surgeries and cosmetic procedures to transform her body into Jessica Rabbit with a penis she remains rather attached to.

Nina Arsenault — whose critically-acclaimed autobiographical play, The Silicone Diaries, will brighten stages this fall and next year in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa — decided a while back that she was tired of others telling the story of her journey to “reclaim” her body.

Yes, beginning in 1999, she embarked on a long, painful, and at times scary metamorphosis that included risky surgeries and illegal silicone injections.

But, sitting behind a desk at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, dressed in a clingy, low-cut black top, leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings, the 36-year-old former sex worker, writer, lecturer and performer with two postgraduate degrees in theatre and playwriting prefers not to dwell on that.

Arsenault is in demand these days. Pride celebrations are around the corner. She’ll be hosting parties, including a prom for young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and questioning queers.

She will also take to the stage at the upcoming IdeaCity conference of big minds in Toronto, and tell her story.

Later this summer, at Theatre Passe Muraille, she’s scheduled to perform i was Barbie, another autobiographical play that riffs on a real-life gig she had to “represent a doll accused of f—–g up the body images of millions of little girls.”

As she put it in an email, it’s a “spiritual portrait of a glittery, digitally-commodified, plastic world from the point of view of a silicone transsexual who represents Barbie at her official birthday party and the opening night of Fashion Week . . . shades of Andy Warhol.”

Yes, she can write.

Her days consist of workouts, voice training with singer Fides Krucker and writing with mentor and collaborator Judith Rudakoff. She works out of her downtown apartment, where she oversees her publicity, right down to the cropping and airbrushing of photos that appear on her website. She likes, she says, to have the final say on everything, a prerogative she has borrowed from Madonna.

So, rather than a narrative, a Q&A followed by a photo shoot orchestrated by Arsenault seems appropriate for a woman who describes herself as a queer artist, and her body as a queer art object.

Q: You’re not the kind of model that sits back and lets the photographer call the shots?

A: No. I see myself more as an auteur. I like to be the subject of the work, but also the creator of the work. As transsexuals, there’s just been so many documentaries about us and they’re usually put together by non-transgendered people. The emphasis is always to make us palatable to whatever audience that’s being spoken to.

Q: How have people tried to make you more palatable?

A: No. 1, they try to make you less sexual. Less sexy.

Q: How is that possible?

A: I’ll take that as a compliment. Sometimes, I’ve done things for a newspaper where they’ll say, ‘We can’t print that photo. It’s too sexual.’ It’s just something about the way my lips are, or there’s maybe cleavage in it. And my response is always that people can get this online now — provocative, naked photos. I think that print media is really behind that way. Another way of making someone who is queer palatable to a normative mass audience is to pathologize them. It’s to say that the things that are different about them, the things that are unique about them, it must be because that person’s f—-d up. Certainly, I’ve been accused of that — it’s dysmorphia, intense perfectionism or narcissism. I always refuse to accept those perspectives on my life. I think it’s very important not to listen to your detractors.

Q: At what point did it become art for you, the transforming of your body? Yes, there´s more…. »

I will be speaking at Moses Znaimer’s ideaCity 2010. They’ve just announced the full list of presenters.

I will be talking about a blasphemous topic: Woman as Art Object.

Check out all the speakers at the following web address:

http://www.ideacityonline.com/presenters/2010

(the following text from their site ideacityonline.com)

What is ideaCity?
50 Presenters, 3 Legendary Parties, a Ton of Inspiration
ideaCity, also known as ‘Canada’s Premiere Meeting of the Minds’, is an eclectic gathering of artists, adventurers, authors, cosmologists, doctors, designers, entertainers, filmmakers, inventors, magicians, musicians, scientists and technologists.

Fifty of the planet’s brightest minds converge on Toronto each June to speak to a highly engaged audience. Only 700 are privileged to attend.

Produced and presented by Moses Znaimer, ideaCity is not themed around any one topic, issue or business. There are no scripted speeches or, breakout or parallel sessions. Rather, everyone is in one place and in on the same narrative.

With extra-long schmooze breaks between sessions, and legendary parties each night, attendees have had an unprecedented opportunity to mingle with such notable speakers as Conrad Black, Barbara Gowdy, Michael Ignatieff, Douglas Coupland, Pamela Wallin, Pete Seeger, Robert Kennedy Jr., John Ralston Saul, Daniel Libeskind, Clayton Ruby, Romeo Dallaire and the late Peter Jennings.

Very excited that my play The Silicone Diaries is being studied at another Canadian university.  It will be required reading in Sexuality and the Stage, a theatre course taught by reknowned playwright/director Sky Gilbert.  I will also be showing up (Nov 2, 2010) to speak in the class.

(The Silicone Diaries was dramaturged by Judith Rudakoff and directed by Brendan Healy.)

The Pride Prom is a spectacular, end-of-year celebration & graduation party especially for Toronto’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual (LGBT) high school students and their guests. Each year, hundreds of queer & trans youth and their friends join us as we crown the Pride Ace, King and Queen! The Pride Prom features celebrity hosts, food, entertainment, spinning by well-known youth DJs, contests and prizes. Past hosts have included actor Adamo Ruggiero, diva D-lischus, comedian Elvira Kurt, Taufiq, Much Music VJ Sook Yin Lee, the lovely Jane (AKA Sky Gilbert), and the marvellous Mirha-Soleil Ross. This is definitely an event you won’t want to miss!

The Pride Prom is co-sponsored by The Triangle Program and Supporting Our Youth.

It takes place at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

On Monday, April 19th at 6:00pm I am going to be taking part in a panel discussion about artists of cultural and sexual diversity making the transition from being a fringe artist to a professional artist. I know that two of the other panelists are Sky Gilbert and Nina Lee Aquino.

The symposium is organized and moderated by Andrew Cheng at Toronto’s Factory Theatre.

I’ve given a lecture for five consecutive years in Introduction to Critical Sexualities, a 2nd year Women’s Studies course at York University. It has two parts. The first part is called The History of M2F Transsexuals 1900 to the Present. It is a historical narrative that I have constructed that illustrates how the meanings around gender-different bodies have been constructed by separate groups of “authorities” over the last 100 years. These authorities have included sexologists, psychiatrists, sex change doctors, gender theorists, and activists, each with their own agendas. The second part of the lecture is called The Eroticization of M2F Transsexuals by Heterosexual Men. It examines the different ways in which sexual meanings (and pleasures) are ascribed to transsexual women’s bodies by (otherwise) heterosexual men.

The following video contains excerpts from the second part of the lecture.

I am going to be speaking at York University’s theatre department’s monthly Prime Time event, a monthly speakers’ series for the students. I will be talking about the process of working on my plays The Silicone Diaries and i was Barbie. I will also be taking part in a live interview about my artistic work by queer theatre academic (and the Chair of the Board of Directors of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre) J. Paul Halferty. The event is taking place on February 10th, 11:30am-1:30pm, in the beautiful Faire Fecan Theatre.

The event is coordinated by Marlis Schweitzer, the Area Coordinator for Theatre Studies at York.

This event will be happening after my final performance of The Silicone Diaries in Whitehorse.

Afterhour with NINA ARSENAULT (Hosted by Jozeph Tisiga)

Nina will be interviewed about her artistic process and other aspects of her work.
A benefit for GALA Yukon
9:00PM——–
$5.00 cover
HENRIETTE’S TAVERNE
4121 Fourth Avenue
Whitehorse, Yukon