Surgical shape-shifting: transgender embodiments in Nina Arsenault's The Silicone Diaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My project examines transgender embodiment through a case study of the life writing of Canadian transgender writer and performance artist Nina Arsenault. I focus on two texts, primarily, her one-woman autobiographical play The Silicone Diaries, as well as her “Manifesto of Living Self-portraiture (Identity, Transformation, and Performance),” both published in 2012. Reading Arsenault’s life writing through transgender studies and somatechnics discourses, I investigate the notion of transgender embodiment as a quest and a process of becoming. \nI first explore Arsenault’s play through close reading sections of the text to analyze how she situates her experience of gender transition as a relentless pursuit of beauty and femininity. Secondly, I examine the diary entries to understand how Arsenault portrays her own changing embodiment in relation to her extensive use of plastic surgery to shape an idealized, hyperreal femininity, and how she enacts gendered embodiment through different forms of performance, including suffering. Arsenault’s artistic work reveals her gender transition to be a state of ongoing transformation rather than a straightforward path from one gender to another.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".