The Role Of Cruelty In Arsenault's Ophelia

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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

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