Man-Made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing

by Ciara Cremin

On July 27th, 2015, Colin Cremin overcame a lifetime of fear and repression and came to work dressed as a woman called Ciara. Wearing full makeup, a blouse, a black skirt, and pantyhose, Cremin walked down the steps of a lecture theater in front of a hundred seated students and, without comment, gave her lecture as usual. In Man-Made Woman , Cremin charts her personal journey as a male-to-female cross-dresser in the ever-changing world of gender politics.
 
Interweaving personal narrative with political discourse, Man-Made Woman is a vivid exploration of gender, identity, fetishism, aesthetics, and popular culture through the lenses of feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalytic theory. Cremin’s anti-moralistic approach dismantles the abjection associated with male-to-female cross dressing, examines the causes of repression, and considers what it means to publicly materialize desire on one’s body. Man-Made Woman is an experiment that ultimately draws both author and reader into a conflict with their material, ideological, and libidinal relationship to patriarchal-capitalism.
 
With an emancipatory and empowering voice, Cremin interrogates her, his, and our relationship to the gender binary. In light of recent debate surrounding transgender bathroom rights in the United States, Man-Made Woman is a deeply personal account that offers timely insight for anyone interested in contemporary trans politics and queer theory.
 

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Feminism, LGBT, Theory, Gender, Gender Studies

208 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2017

About the author

Dr Ciara Cremin is a senior lecturer of sociology at the University of Auckland. Her work spans a range of topics from Marxism, to video games, to feminism and gender studies, through the lens of Critical Theory (which aims to explain social problems as symptoms of existing social structures and cultural biases, rather than from individuals alone).

Reviews

[Henry Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every page was a revelation. This book is a beautiful white dress on the dance floor -- ever-flowing and gliding from topic to topic effortlessly and free. These chapters are fucking long so prepare for Ciara to take you off the beaten path. It's personal testimonials of crossdressing and challenging the patriarchy but then all of a sudden it's Deleuze and Lacan and Marx but then all of a sudden we're talking about pop culture. It's like omg Ciara your mind >>> I didn't want this book to end.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a well written and interesting book. I will be thinking about a lot of the points raised for a good while.