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)

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

The interview is in two parts (below), and it’s about 20 minutes long. Cynthia Loyst and I chat about my transformations, straight men who are attracted to transsexuals and about my upcoming play I was Barbie at SummerWorks 2010. Brendan Healy, my director and the Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre joins us later in the interview, too!

The show originally aired on Friday, June 4th. Big thanks to Star Network and CP24 for having us on, and for supporting queer performance!

I wanted to do this self-portrait series for a few reasons.

I wanted to try working with video which I had never done before. I wanted to document my moving body in a more permanent form than theatre. I’ve done two live performance self-portraits (one woman autobiographical shows), but in the theatre there is always a consideration to entertain. Or at least to be compelling. You’ve taken people’s money and have asked them to sit quietly in a dark room for a period of time. With this project I wanted to explore other types of performance without those constraints.

I wanted the freedom to be emotionally detached, banal, discordant and truly obsessive in the manipulation of my visual image.

I should also mention that at the time I was putting these together (spring-fall 2009) I had become so wrapped up in my own glamour that I had to start commenting on it. Crack it open a little. Destroy a bit of it. Loosen its hold on me.

I define glamour as that which gives the effect or aura of beauty or special-ness, but is not beauty itself. For me, the elements of glamour can include make-up, clothing, fake hair, body positioning, social status, prestige, publicity, having cameras on you, being on television, having your image reproduced and mass produced, as well as having your image disseminated.

Glamour and its effects prevade our culture. Everyone is susceptable to it.

These pieces are an unapologetic self-exploration of my personal glamour. Video seemed an ideal medium to explore this for obvious reasons.

I consider these self-portraits early rudimentary experiments into queer video.

I suggest reading the artists statements below each video before viewing them.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE (GLAMOUR-CRACK 1)

When I made this I was fascinated by celebrity footage I started watching on TMZ and other blog sites- uneditted paparazzi footage of celebrities. There is little narrative to these videos. Famous people, usually at least a bit fucked up, roll in and out of parties, they drive around with cameras following them, they are on red carpets, far away at an event or a bar. Everywhere is glitter, fashion, flashbulbs and the everpresent gaze of the camera. I found the videos utterly compelling for the aura of glamour, a magic spell of importance, they gave to the actresses even while they did the most banal or indecypherable things. Every nuance of the ‘celebrity performances’ I viewed became interesting to me. I laughed when I told this to my friend, Josh, who is a music video and television director, and he called those videos “quick, cheap, disposable hits of glamour-crack.”

FYI – When I was asked to be Barbie at LG Fashion Week I was sometimes aware and sometimes not aware that my friend Michael was filming me, but nothing in this video is made up.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS EARLY MORNING TV APPEARANCE (GLAMOUR-CRACK 2)

When I was asked to do this interview I only agreed to do it if I could have equal shared rights to all of the raw video footage. I have been interviewed and featured on television programs in the past who would later edit and alter the footage “to make good TV.” This editing often portrayed me in a way I didn’t feel was accurate, but was intended to make me (at the best of times) more palatable to mass audiences, more sympathetic, more understandable, etc. Sometimes, I felt that the people handling the footage revealed their own prejudices about trans issues, beauty and plastic surgery in how they manipulated the video footage (and me.) Sometimes I felt they handled the raw footage to hide their own feelings about my trans body which were apparent to me on set.

This video is my re-edit, my representation, and a kind of emotional response and intellectual critique to these experiences. I radically re-editted the footage the station aired. I also added all of the titles.

Thank you to Amira for being such a great sport about it.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS NIGHTCLUB PROJECTION (GLAMOUR-CRACK 3)

In June, 2009, I went down to Montreal’s to host the legendary Drama Queen party at Tribe Hyperclub. (Past hosts include Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Lepore and Lena Love.) I showed up a day early to shoot a video that the promoters wanted to project on the club’s giant screen above the dance floor throughout the night and on the monitors around the various bars.

I think the early idea was to get some sexy shots, runway, footage, acting like a Pussy Cat Doll, generally giving a fierce tranny effect. Typical “club tranny” stuff.

At the time I was really obsessed with David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire, as well as Cindy Sherman’s Centerfold series. I told them I wanted to use those works as inspiration. I also wanted to do something discordant, a video that wasn’t what it was supposed to be, something that would critique what it was supposed to be.

This is what we came up with.

The video was orginally played on a loop so the director cut it again after the party when he had more time to really make it what we wanted.

In order to show it online I put this particular dance track to the video.

I love knowing that the first installation showing of this video was above dancefloor because this video is so unusal.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS PHOTO SHOOT (GLAMOUR-CRACK 4)

David J. Romero took photos of me all through my video shoot for the Drama Queen night club projection. The idea was to create a fashion spread simultaneously. He produced so many images I liked that I wanted to turn his photography into another project so I put them on an image stream. In doing this what is created is a narrative of “fake” posed moments and “real” candid moments. Romero kept shooting whether I was ready for a close-up or exhausted under the hot lights.

I’d like to point out that the above video ’skews’ the reality of what it was to be at the shoot. Contrived and uncontrived visual moments were captured and now strung together on a timeline, but the actual shoot took about nine hours from hair and make-up to wrap. I think this ‘telescoped’ version of time heightens the glamour of the shoot so much that it becomes abhorrant.

I’ve used every single the photographer took.

To see the series of photographs David Romero selected (and manipulated) for his beautiful series cut and paste the link below:

http://ninaarsenault.com/2009/08/photo-shoot-with-david-j-romero/

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.

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.

The following video is from Season 2 of Kink, a documentary production (Alliance Atlantis) about people with extraordinary sex lives. It was shot in 2001 and aired on Showcase TV. I was one of the main characters.

…below are some publicity shots Alliance Atlantis took of me (2002). They make me laugh a little bit now.

This interview was shot on the opening night of LG L’Oreal Fashion Week. It was the launch of David Dixon’s Barbie-inspired fashion line for real women as well as the 50th birthday party of Mattel’s best loved plastic doll. I was asked to represent Barbie that night.

I saw Taylor Mac perform at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb! festival last February. She was one of the most inspiring live performance artists I have ever seen. This queen is making the world a better place, one performance at a time.