Abstract
Gigi Gorgeous: This Is Everything (dir. Barbara Kopple, 2017) is a feature-length documentary following the life of Canadian YouTube video blogger Giselle “Gigi” Lazzarato—aka Gigi Gorgeous—currently distributed on the site's premium streaming feature, YouTube Red. As one of YouTube's most high-profile content producers and its most successful trans video blogger (“vlogger”), Lazzarato has thoroughly documented her life on-screen; however, she has largely avoided sharing details of her surgical procedures. This Is Everything takes a closer look at her rise to fame alongside the story of her gender transition, revealing how Lazzarato has carefully engineered the documentation of her surgeries to navigate the burgeoning marketplace of online celebrity. Following Jasbir K. Puar, this review argues that the film demonstrates an axiomatic case of “piecing” the transgender body that extends the temporality of surgical procedures, thus mapping the rehabilitation of transgender subjects into productive citizens of the neoliberal US economy.
