Man-Made Woman ─ The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing

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.

Ciara Cremin is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Auckland. She is author of Totalled and Capitalism’s New Clothes, both published by Pluto Press.