Transgendered playwright, performer, columnist, and sex worker Nina Arsenault has undergone more than sixty plastic surgeries in pursuit of a feminine beauty ideal. In TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault, Judith Rudakoff brings together a diverse group of contributors, including artists, scholars, and Arsenault herself to offer an exploration of beauty, image, and the notion of queerness through the lens of Arsenault's highly personal brand of performance art. Illustrated throughout with photographs of the artist's transformation over the years and demonstrating her diversity of personae, this volume contributes to a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be beautiful. Also included in this volume is the full script of Arsenault's critically acclaimed stage play, The Silicone Diaries.

Nina Arsenault is a transgendered, cross-disciplinary artist who has worked in theatre, television, film, video art, photography, and print. Her life and her transition from male to female have been the subject of numerous Canadian and international documentary television programs, radio interviews, and print articles. In 2005, she took control of her voice and image to write her T-Girl column in Toronto's fab Magazine, a series of autobiographical stories which she later adapted into her-acclaimed one woman play. The Silicone Diaries, which has been performed across Canada. Arsenault is also engaged in the practice of photographing her body, an artistic process she has undertaken at all points of her physical metamorphosis. Judith Rudakoff has worked as a dramaturg with emerging and established playwrights throughout Canada and in Cuba, Denmark, South Africa, England and the United States. Her work as dramaturg for The Silicone Diaries continues her long association with Nina Arsenault. Rudakoff is the co-editor (with Lynn M. Thomson) of Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy (2002). She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, and is a Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada where she teaches theatre.