The Role Of Cruelty In Arsenault's Ophelia

In closing, the transgender Ophelia can be read as a palimpsest—of texts, of genders, of cultural constructs—to explore the deep affinity between the transgender Ophelia’s intertextual construction and the everyday sensations and lessons of Arsenault’s transgender embodiment. Arsenault’s Ophelia, like her creator, uses her own body in an Artaudian theatre of cruelty to produce the logic of fascination and the enigma. Arsenault’s spectral return to Shakespeare’s text seems to be born of what Barba calls “[giving] the spectator something to remember even after they have forgotten it” (309). It is this logic born of a sense of wonder with which we must regard the transgender ghost of Ophelia—a look that, registering the audience’s and critic’s

fasciation, spoils the fixed rigidity of the categories governing the use of that finite gaze that has played so fundamental a role in the erasure of Ophelia’s transgender ghost.
Given that “[c]onfronting, intoxicating, she is everything we have despised and yet we love love love her” (Joseph par. 9, emphasis original) names the way of seeing that the transgender Ophelia solicits from her audience, it also names the mode of embodied subjectivity she represents. Like artistic endeavors, the body need not remain straitjacketed within such categories as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ embodiment, but can remain open to contact with, as Haraway reveals, that which is not yet (re)read. As Arsenault’s performance suggests, once free from these passé categories we need no longer perform our bodily relation to otherness—either the otherness of biological bodies or the otherness of surgically modified bodies, whether marked as ‘man,’ ‘woman’ or neither—through a longing for Ophelia’s permanent death, but can literally and figuratively redraft transgender embodiment through engaging the bodily experience of traditional literary figures such as Ophelia with a sense of “cooperative respect, always as if under someone else’s knife” (Arsenault 65).