Nina Arsenault | |
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| Born | January 20, 1974 Beamsville, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation(s) | performer, actress, sex-trade worker |
Nina Arsenault (born January 20, 1974) is a Canadian performance artist, freelance writer, and former sex worker who works in theatre, dance, video, photography and visual art.
Arsenault grew up in a trailer park in Beamsville, Ontario. She has two master's degrees. [1] At one point prior to her transition, Arsenault was an instructor at York University, [2] where she taught acting. [3]
She has said she realized that she was a trans woman in August 1996 [4] and her transition was in full force around 1998. [5] By 2007 she had undergone over $150,000 in surgery during her transition, [6] financed through work in the sex trade [3] as a web cam girl, a stripper and a self-described "hooker [performing oral sex only]". [7]
Arsenault wrote a regular column on transgender issues for 36 issues of fab , a biweekly Toronto-based LGBT magazine. Her last column was in early 2007.
She has appeared on the television series Train 48 and KinK , as well as the Showtime movie Soldier's Girl .
She had a well-publicized encounter with Tommy Lee where he flirted with Arsenault for some time before discovering that Arsenault was transgender, and subsequently left in a hurry. [8]
Arsenault appeared in a one-act play written especially for her by Sky Gilbert in November 2007 entitled Ladylike. [9] She also wrote her own one woman show called The Silicone Diaries, [3] directed by Buddies in Bad Times Artistic Director Brendan Healy, which toured across Canada to sold-out houses and critical praise.
She appeared also on The Jon Dore Television Show , appearing in the episode "Manly Man". She stated the reason why she does not want bottom surgery:
I work as a dancer in a club that caters to men who like "transsexuals." They want us to have beautiful breasts, you know, to be sexy like females but they want that one thing to be different. [10]
In 2010, she performed an autobiographical play entitled i was Barbie. [11]
In 2012, she performed for 40 Days and 40 Nights as part of the inaugural SummerWorks Live Art series in Toronto. For this performance, she spent 40 days undergoing a spiritual experience and opened the last 11 days to the public. As part of this performance, she spent two hours a night whipping herself while riding an exercise bike. [12] She has also performed For Every Time You Shattered Me I Made Myself Again, a six-hour performance in The Henry Moore Sculpture Room at The Art Gallery of Ontario where she appeared in a myriad of different personas live and onscreen, dressing, undressing and washing herself with a number of unspecified fluids in front of the audience.
In 2013, at London's performance space she lived inside an art gallery for six days for a work called Lillex. Here, with UK artist Poppy Jackson, Arsenault performed rituals which explored feminine mythology as well as virtuality, including a trance-like dance which would often continue for six hours at a time. During these dances she was repeatedly burned with cigarettes on her chest, neck, breasts and occasionally above the genitals, and appeared unaffected by pain.
Her photographic and video collaborations with artists like Bruce LaBruce, John Greyson, Jordan Tannahill, and Istvan Kantor have been shown across Canada and around the world via film and video festivals, academic and art journals, and galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Pleasuredome, FADO and New York University.
Arsenault has been a frequent guest speaker at universities in Canada and the United States as well as intellectual conferences like Moses Znaimer's Ideacity. She has also worked as a social activist promoting the rights and dignity of trans people with The Toronto Police Service, Mount Sinai Hospital, Women's College Hospital, The Sherbourne Health Centre, Supporting Our Youth, and The 519 Church Street Community Centre.
In 2013, Arsenault joined MAU, a New Zealand company of contemporary performance led by Lemi Ponifasio. Her first work with MAU was called The Crimson House and was scheduled for a world tour in 2014 and beyond. In the same year, she had a supporting role in Greyson's web series Murder in Passing . [13]
Arsenault's life and work are the subject of the book Trans(per)forming Nina Arsenault - An Unreasonable Body of Work, edited by Judith Rudakoff, published in April 2012. [14]
Arsenault dated Canadian killer and alleged cannibal Luka Magnotta around 2002 before his notoriety for violent crimes. She says that Magnotta was obsessed with wanting to be famous, and that he made disturbing comments about injuring kittens when they dated. She has said that she believes that the murders he is alleged to have committed were done as a result of, and under the influence of, drugs. [15]
Shemale is a term most commonly used in the pornography industry to describe trans women or other people with male genitalia and female secondary sex characteristics acquired via hormones or surgery. Many people in the transgender community consider the term offensive and degrading. Using the term shemale for a trans woman may imply that she is working in the sex trade.
Enza Anderson is a Canadian journalist, media personality, Ontario politician, and transgender rights activist.
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fab was a Canadian gay magazine that published biweekly issues in Toronto, Ontario from 1994 to 2013. It published alternate weeks to the city's other biweekly gay publication, Xtra! The publication's official spelling uses a lower-case F: fab.
John Greyson is a Canadian director, writer, video artist, producer, and political activist, whose work frequently deals with queer characters and themes. He was part of a loosely affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
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In May 2012, Jun Lin, a university student, was fatally stabbed and dismembered in Montreal, Canada, by Luka Rocco Magnotta, who then mailed Lin's hands and feet to elementary schools and federal political party offices. After a video depicting the murder was posted online, Magnotta fled Canada, becoming the subject of an Interpol Red Notice and prompting an international manhunt. In June 2012, he was arrested in an internet café in Berlin. In December 2014, after eight days of deliberations, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder. Magnotta was given a mandatory life sentence and 19 years for other charges, to be served concurrently. Magnotta was previously sought by animal rights groups for uploading videos of himself killing kittens.
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity is a 2007 book by the gender theorist, biologist, and writer Julia Serano. The book is a transfeminist manifesto that makes the case that transphobia is rooted in sexism and that transgender activism is a feminist movement. The second edition of the book was published in March 2016.
Transgender pornography is a genre of pornography featuring transsexual or transgender actors. The majority of the genre features trans women, but trans men are sometimes featured. Trans women are most often featured with male partners, but they are also featured with other women, both transgender and cisgender.
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Arsenault turned to sex work as a web cam girl, a stripper and a hooker (oral sex only).
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