The Department of Gender Studies Speakers' Series invites you to a presentation by Zaren Healey White, Master of Gender Studies candidate.

My work examines transgender experience and embodiment through an analysis of Canadian transgender performance artist Nina Arsenault and her autobiographical one-woman stage play The Silicone Diaries (2012). I will use Arsenault’s multivalent performances – through life writing, stage plays, and self-portraiture – to explore theories of transgender embodiment and experience as imagined by those who have experienced it. Arsenault’s extensive cosmetic surgery has transmogrified her body into a living art canvas and forms the basis for her artistic work. Considering Arsenault among other self-styled, hyperfeminine art subject-objects, I will explore how her practice involves the pursuit of an exaggerated, hypersexual, feminine ideal of beauty while simultaneously subverting essentialist or naturalized notions of what it means to be a woman.