Trans(per)Forming Nina Arsenault

An unreasonable body of work

Judith Rudakoff, Judith Rudakoff

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841506951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica in ambito scientifico e tecnologico

After sixty surgeries at a cost of almost $200, 000 to feminize and beautify her originally male body, transgendered Canadian artist Nina Arsenault has created a body of work emanating from her experiences that includes photographs, videos disseminated online, a website, a blog, several social networking presentation sites, stage plays, print media writing and performance of the body in both celebrity appearances and daily public life. Arsenault was born in rural Ontario in 1974 and until the age of six lived as Rodney in a trailer park with her working-class family. Her father delivered bread.

PART I

THE TEXTS

Chapter 1

Affirming Identity with Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyborg

Sky Gilbert

It’s over. The heady days of gay liberation that so intoxicated queer people in the late 1960s and early 1970s are gone. And the seeds of destruction were sown by queer academics themselves. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault championed the notion that the homosexual identity was more constructed than real. And (soon after) Judith Butler expressed her ambivalent feelings about identity politics: “I’m permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them as sites of necessary trouble.”¹

As the early queer theorists prepared us for a challenge to identity politics, AIDS was devastating the gay community and causing a tidal shift in gay sensibilities. The battles we had waged in the name of our identities, to allow bathhouses to remain open or to “keep the laws off our bodies,”² seemed selfish and indulgent in the shadow of AIDS. Conservative queers began coupling and moving to the suburbs. A plethora of gay pundits stepped forward to celebrate the decline of gay: Andrew Sullivan proudly proclaimed the queer potential to be just like everyone else,³ Michaelangelo Signorile collected an entire book of interviews that confirmed the deurbanization of gay men,⁴ and Bert Archer trumpeted “The End of Gay” in his book of the same title.⁵ Queer academia provided a theoretical rejection of identity politics in the mid-1990s led by David Tuller, who claimed in PoMoSexuals, “sexuality is far more subtle than the rigid categories, the concrete bunkers that we create to describe it.”⁶ By the year 2000, the discussion of gay and lesbian identity was replaced by an exploration of the wider application of values inspired by same-sex attraction. The editors of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire say in their introduction:

The essays included in this collection … share this fundamental supposition: scrutinizing and politicizing the intersections between sex and nature not only opens environmentalism to a wider understanding of justice, but also deploys the anti-heteronormative insistences of queer politics to potentially more biophilic ends than has been generally imagined.⁷

The editors of Queer Ecologies see their attitude as a harbinger of the future; on the one hand, there is a hope that environmentalism will be open to the contributions from queer culture (which of course implies there is a queer identity); on the other hand, the book wishes to make queer politics biophilic, which means nothing other than understanding how queer radical social notions (promiscuity, for instance) are, in fact, natural. So, however strange or outrageous our actions as queers may seem to some, we are part of an eons old, biological family.

My inclinations lie in a different direction. Not only am I sexually attracted to men, but I identify as effeminate and promiscuous. In addition, I was raised in a culture that trained me to view myself as a highly unnatural outcast. Like so many other queers born before gay liberation, I have learned to love my identity as a lone, effeminate, rebellious male and I cannot easily release myself from this romantic, tragic singularity. Thus, it’s difficult for me to publish essays on the subject of gay politics. In 2009, I wrote a newspaper article in which I proclaimed that I was no longer gay, since gay, I proposed, now means being a normal, god-fearing, monogamous good citizen. I identified myself as an ESPIE (a category I invented for myself): an Effeminate Sexual Person. Ironically, the essay was rejected by the editors of Toronto’s lesbian and gay biweekly newspaper Xtra because (as they told me in a telephone conversation in December 2009, and I’ll paraphrase, “we’re not into identity politics”). One of Canada’s major national daily newspapers, The Globe and Mail, however, was not afraid to publish it.⁸

Not only am I proudly effeminate (and a proud drag queen!) but these days it makes more sense for me to focus on gender rather than sexuality. By writing about gender I am able to explore my queer agenda without dragging out the identity categories. This focus on femininity led me to write a stage play titled Ladylike for Nina Arsenault in 2007.

I first met Nina approximately ten years before, as Rodney, then a graduate student at York University, who asked me to have lunch with him. At lunch he inquired if I would be in interested in performing in a play he had written about three drag queens. I told him that I didn’t much like acting; we discussed the state of queer theatre and queer politics. He then dropped out of my life.

I’m not sure when I first saw Nina after her transformation. It may very well have been on the Canadian television station OutTV’s gay sports comedy show, Locker Room, where she played the role of a steroid-raging female bodybuilder. At any rate, I was a big fan. When I was casting my play, Will the Real J. T. LeRoy Please Stand Up?, I auditioned Nina for the part of “Tatum O’Neal.” (The character was a beautiful, spaced-out female movie star.) Nina’s audition was wonderful and though when the play was produced in 2007, I ended up casting Canadian actor Ellen-Ray Hennessy, I couldn’t get Nina out of my mind. During the same time period, when I was working out the subject matter for a one-act play to produce in Hamilton, Ontario (where I now live), my partner Ian suggested that I write a play for Nina. At first I was intimidated by the idea. But I talked myself into writing a play for Nina by telling myself that the play would not be about identity, but instead about gender: Ladylike.

Ladylike is a one-act monologue with a few short scenes that take place between Nina’s character and her boyfriend. The plot of the play is slim; Nina’s character tries to explain to an audience (whom she obviously perceives as skeptical) why she has always loved femininity. She also tries to explain the relationship between femininity and masochism. The boyfriend character is not physically abusive, but it’s clear that he has the potential for emotional abuse; for example, he takes drugs and occasionally disappears from her life. What Nina’s character wishes her boyfriend to understand is that though she loves submitting to him (in and out of bed), she doesn’t want, or deserve, to be physically or emotionally abused. In the final moments of the play, Nina’s boyfriend seems to understand her arguments, and says that she is a “real woman,” and there is a happy ending: they kiss.

When I sent the play to Nina for her consideration, I told her that this was not a play about what it means to be transsexual, but instead about what it means to be born a biological male who loves his femininity. Nina told me that she loved the script and identified with the heroine.

In proposing to work with Nina, I strove to take advantage of what I presumed we had in common. For instance, in Nina’s play The Silicone Diaries she remembers how, as a child, she looked at naked pictures of women in magazines with the other boys, imagining that someday she would be a sexy lady: “This is exactly what I will be when I grow up.”⁹ Although I never wanted to be a woman, I, too, was an effeminate little boy and I dreamed of being a ballerina. Nina and I also share a love/hate relationship with masochism. I was inspired to write Ladylike partly because I had also seen Nina, on the Canadian Reality TV show Kink, struggling with her attraction to her hulking, ubermasculine, tattooed boyfriend (an ex-prison inmate): the type of man who is so wrapped up in his own problems that he has little time or energy to give a woman the attention she deserves. But though drag queens and transsexuals share some inclinations, they are also quite different. Nina lives as a woman (or perhaps more accurately, as an openly transgendered person). I dress up to perform—or occasionally to flirt. Also, I don’t share Nina’s passion for body modification through plastic surgery.

But although I can’t identify with Nina’s passion for body modification, it’s what I love the most about her. She has chosen to become a highly unnatural-looking caricature of a woman; in fact, she likes to compare herself to the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit. There must have been a moment during Nina’s plastic surgery when she looked enough like a woman to pass as one. She also could have had her penis removed. Why did she choose not to take advantage of these opportunities to make her less evidently a transsexual, and more seamlessly a woman? The answer can only be that Nina did not want to be an ordinary “real” woman, but instead to become the extraordinary creature she is. Nina is proud of her outsider status: she is quite open about being a shemale and having been a sex-trade worker. You can’t look at Nina without thinking about sex and sexual difference; her transformation was less from man to woman than from man to a heterosexual man’s porn star fantasy.

Nina’s presentation of herself has huge theoretical implications; those implications are what make her (and her work) controversial. I would argue that Nina’s brazen, hypersexual persona is a potent reminder that—postmodern theorizing to the contrary—our propensity for identity politics cannot be easily be dismissed. I certainly understand what might offend feminists about Nina. She has chosen the cosmetic sexist trappings that so many women have rejected as confining. Nina is the most fascist of body fascists: even as a child her fantasies about being a woman were more related to highly sexualized images of artificial-looking women (mannequins and men’s magazine fold-outs) than to real women. The fact that Nina is thoroughly conscious of (and articulate about) the political implications of her choices is cold comfort to feminists who see her as someone who has chosen to wrap herself in the media images they feel consciously or unconsciously pressured to emulate.

But Nina’s presentation of herself is anachronistic in another sense. She is a living, breathing reminder that identity is not fluid. Her approach to gender is in direct contrast to that of the hugely influential transsexual activist and trans theorist Kate Bornstein. As queer theorists began to reject identity politics in the mid-1990s, Bornstein proposed to abolish gender as an oppressive binary system. The introduction to her gender workbook says, “warning label: this workbook gets into the subject and area of something we can call for lack of a better (or any) term ‘no gender.’ That’s how I see myself: I live pretty much without a gender, which paradoxically means I can do many genders.”¹⁰ Bornstein’s argument is based on the notion of gender fluidity. Although she transformed herself from a man to a woman, she doesn’t see herself as having chosen one over the...