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)

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.)

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.

(I orginally wrote this article for issue 301 of fab! magazine, tgirl column, 2006)

A woman slunk by in an exact replica of Princess Leia’s slave girl costume from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, complete with metal bra and flimsy loincloth. A 30-something beefcake of a guy dressed as He-Man, from the cartoon Masters of the Universe, did a Chippendales-inspired groin gyration while chanting, “I am power!” His girlfriend, in a She-ra, Princess of Power super-bikini, approached me, whispering lustfully, “Haven’t seen you since Club Sin.” “You’ve mistaken me for another shemale,” I replied politely. I tried to escape from perverts expressing their kink through sci-fi drag at Toronto Trek 20, a respectable Star Trek and science fiction convention. I wanted to look available in case any hot Klingons beamed in. In the ’80s, while the other Grade 8 boys were jerking off to sweet Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth album cover or saccharine videos of Tiffany’s mall tour, I was wanking over Worf, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s animalistic, honour-bound stereotype of masculinity in a spandex uniform.

Never a hardcore Trekker, I watched the show because I was hot for Data –an android programmed with sexual capabilities – in my opinion, the most underused crew member. But mostly I lusted for Klingons, space Neanderthals with antiquated gender politics and forehead bumps, real rough-around-the-edges guys. Yes, there´s more…. »

(this is a monologue that I cut from the performance text of The Silicone Diaires. I performed this at The Saint John Theatre Company’s production of The Silicone Diaries in August 2008. At that point the play was in a first draft form and contained stories that were highlights of my physical transformation. The text has since been rewritten, and I think it is more personal and profound. But I wanted to share this monologue cause it was truly a blast performing it in New Brunswick.  I hope you enjoy it, and find it interesting.)

For years I’m taking pharmaceutical doses of female hormones and testosterone blockers. Little pills give me soft feminine skin, enough breast tissue to get breast implants. They get rid of body hair, help with getting rid of facial hair. They will generally keep me from masculinizing as I age. What transsexual woman wants to worry about getting hairier as she gets older? Ear hair after forty? Do you know what thoughts like that do to me? I want every little bit of femininity that hormone pills, my tiny dream-come-true pills can offer me, and I go to two or three doctors at a time to get as many prescriptions as I can. Cyclon 21: the birth control pill with estrogen for women who want to avoid getting pregnant. Estrace: estrogen made from plants given to menopausal women. Premarin: synthesized estrogen from Pregnant Mare Urine. Pre-mar-in. Little yellow pills. Proscar: a prostrate cancer drug that stops testosterone. Androcure: a drug sometimes forcibly prescribed to convicted pedaephiles to cure them of androgens (male sex hormones). Yes, I am subverting the medical system, but pharmaceutical companies don’t even make drugs for transsexuals. I have to convince doctors to give me other people’s hand-me-downs.

But popping these dolls comes at a cost. That’s what I started calling the pills. Dolls. Like from Valley of the Dolls. I am spending nearly five hundred dollars a month on them, and I feel like I am PMS-ing everyday of my life – mood swings, I’m irritable, I’m depressed. Also, my doctors warn me about the effect these medications can take on my liver and the chance, the small chance that I could develop a lethal blood clot. I won’t listen, not where beauty and femininity is concerned. I tell the doctor, “Keith, give me the fucking hormones. Give me the fucking hormones, Keith. If you have to put me in the coffin just make sure I’m wearing something low cut to show off my cleavage.” Eventually, Keith sends me to another doctor.

September 11th, 2001: The phone rings. It is my boyfriend at the time. I am waking up groggy, no idea that the twin towers are coming down. “Hello?” “This is the beginning of World War 3, baby, and the end of society as we know it. Woooooooooo-eee!” The first thought that races through my mind, I can’t even tell you how fast it goes through my brain: “My femininity is dependant on swallowing these little pills everyday.” Yes, there´s more…. »

The “Manly Man” episode of The Jon Dore Show aired again last week.  I had a really nice time shooting this for the Comedy Network.  I think it originally aired about 1 year ago. 

On set, everyone was super sweet and very relaxed.  The director even let me see myself on the monitor to make sure I liked the way I was lit.  They were kind enough to shoot me from the three quarter angle which I like because I think it is the most flattering.  And, the producers, Jon and everyone on set assured me that no one would be making any transphobic jokes.  Yes, there´s more…. »

photo by Tony Fong, courtesy of Fab! magazine

(this article originally appeared in my T-Girl column in Fab! magazine, Toronto’s Gay Scene Magazine, 2005)

I’ve had sex with two professional athletes, a movie star, two TV personalities, the CEOs of two Fortune 500 companies, four guys who worked for the Mob, a string of strippers, many male models, a bunch of bodybuilders, loads of nightclubbing suburban guys and even a few crackheads – all of them straight.

When I parade into a gay nightclub hanging from the tanned, bulging arm of one of these men, heads turn and eyebrows arch. Cliques of queers throughout the party wonder why these guys want so desperately to be with a tranny if they are supposed to be hetero. I tell them that when it comes to tranny-lovers, there are several types…

1. The Porn Aficionado
He’s spent whole weekends fantasizing over the impossible female bodies represented in porn. Then he goes to a club and sees the 36DD-24-42 tranny exposing her store-bought body parts on the dance floor. Concluding that a body like that is built for sex, he assumes that this silicone dream girl is wilder and hornier than anyone from the pages of Hustler. So what if she has a cock? She looks like Pamela Anderson’s over-the-top friend.

2. The Anal Addict
His opening line usually begins: “One time my girlfriend did this thing to me…” He explains that while getting a blow job, his girlfriend’s fingers went straight up his straight behind and into the male G-spot. It was the best orgasm of his life, and soon he was shopping for a respectably-sized dildo at Seduction. Then he started eyeing the shemale escort ads in the back pages of eye Weekly – behind his girlfriend’s back, of course. Yes, there´s more…. »

This segment originally appeared on Entertainment Tonight Canada in June, 2007, when I was the recipient of The Unstoppable Award from Pride Toronto and Toronto’s mayor David Miller.