TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work ed. by Judith Rudakoff (review)

The popular Netflix show Orange Is the New Black features a trans woman of colour as a main character; the University of Arizona advertises four new faculty appointments in trans studies. The stars seemingly align for one of the first times in history around and across the body of trans. In this same moment appears the transgendered multimedia performance artist Nina Arsenault, her own constellation of embodiment, performance, self-making of gender. Arsenault is a Toronto-based playwright (author of The Silicone Diaries), columnist, and sex worker who has undergone over sixty surgeries at a cost in excess of $200,000 to feminize and beautify her originally male body. The result is an extraordinary body of work that signals both the transgendered body as representational practice and the deconstruction of hyperfemininized Western beauty ideals. Editor Judith Rudakoff is to be commended for an insightful introduction and for collecting scholars and critics alike who not only theorize the text that is “Nina Arsenault” but also the context from which Arsenault-as-text emerges. Well-known Canadian queer theatre superstar Sky Gilbert appears alongside Brendan Healy, the director of The Silicone Diaries, with both next to the author, screenwriter, and producer Todd Klinck, who, in turn, reflects on the queer theatre/performance community-based locales that “Arsenault” indexes. Rigorous thinking by academics Shannon Bell, Alistair Newton, Benjamin Gillespie, and David Fancy in conversation with those contexts fills out the scholarship, giving it a beautiful depth of analysis and locating Arsenault’s body of work alongside international bodies of work. For instance, the aesthetic questions raised by the French artist ORLAN, who also engages in radical cosmetic surgical procedures as artistic practice, resonate significantly when placed next to those from Arsenault’s work, shifting the focus away from American-based trans studies toward a much larger scope. Eric Armstrong’s essay in search of the politics and aesthetics of the feminine voice is particularly noteworthy. Placing Arsenault’s in a tradition of the hyperfeminine evoked by figures like Marilyn Monroe, Armstrong listens for and through trans voices, suggesting that sound, range, and pitch are as much the work of engenderedness as visuality. Arsenault herself, as both artist and subject, is also woven into the collection through thirty-five photographs of the surgical body-in-progress, a complete text of The Silicon Diaries, and new work, making the anthology its own archival reference. To wit: if the subject of this collection is herself trans, that is, a convergence of and complex intersecting of post-identitarian relations, then so too is the collection itself. While singularly focused on Arsenault, the collection as event arrives through its own imperative equally to become, cohere, but not fully appear through the articulated but deferred presence of its own text – that is, the incoherence of its referent “Nina Arsenault.” That said, the ghost of this anthology is the fact that after one mention in the introduction, the essays collected here do not pursue the obvious: that the representations of femininity idealized through Arsenault’s work are those of white femininity in particular. While the essays do a really precise and nuanced deconstruction of hyperfemininity – something for which Arsenault herself lays the groundwork in her performance texts – I am left wondering in the end about the obviousness of white plasticity that continues to be posited as self-evident through analytical underscrutiny. Nevertheless, the text remains vital to the emerging field of trans studies; kudos to Rudakoff and Arsenault.