Man-Made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing - Softcover

Cremin, Ciara Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337120 ISBN 13: 9780745337128

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

On July 27th, 2015, Colin Cremin overcame a lifetime of fear and repression and came to work dressed as a woman called Ciara. This book charts her personal journey as a male-to-female cross-dresser in the ever-changing world of gender politics. Interweaving the personal and the political, through discussions of fetishism, aesthetics and popular culture, Man-Made Woman explores gender, identity and pleasure through the lenses of feminism, Marxism and psychoanalytic theory. Cremin’s anti-moralistic approach dismantles the abjection associated with male-to-female cross dressing, examining the causes of its repression, and considers what it means to publicly materialise desire on her body. Emancipatory and empowering: Cremin interrogates her, his and our relationship to the gender binary. Man-Made Woman is an experiment in thought and practice through which both author and reader are drawn ultimately into a conflict with our material, ideological and libidinal relationship to patriarchal-capitalism.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ciara aka Colin Cremin is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Auckland. She is author of several books, including Man-Made Woman (Pluto, 2017), Totalled (Pluto, 2015) and Capitalism's New Clothes (Pluto, 2011).

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Man-Made Woman

The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing

By Ciara Cremin

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2017 Ciara Cremin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3712-8

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
1 What's in a Dress?, 1, 
2 On the Lavatory Question, 23, 
3 The Aesthetic of Cross-Dressing, 53, 
4 Everyone's a Fetishist, 83, 
5 How Popular Culture Made Me (a Woman), 123, 
6 Full Exposure, 179, 
Notes, 194, 
Bibliography, 198, 
Index, 205, 

CHAPTER 1

What's in a Dress?

Out of the Bat Cave

Without giving prior notice, on 27 July 2015, after a lifetime of looking and dressing as a man in public, I came to work, the University of Auckland where I lecture in sociology, wearing full makeup, a blouse, a black skirt that ended above the knee, pantyhose and court shoes. I walked down the steps of a lecture theatre in front of a hundred or so seated students and, without making any reference to what I had on, gave a lecture on popular culture. Cross-dressing at home had not, as I imagined, prepared me for the effect this change would have on my own sensibilities and relationships to men and women, colleagues, students, friends and strangers. I don't subscribe to essentialist notions of gender, sexuality, or identity. Yet in those places that seem relatively safe in which I do wander dressed in women's clothes, I feel more at ease in myself, and my sense of alienation in the world appears, if only momentarily, to diminish. People relate to me differently too and, adjusting to this change, I in turn relate to them differently and see myself in a different way. A shift in perspective has made me more aware of the depths of misogyny in our society but also more cognisant of assumptions I'd made about gender. I didn't cross that threshold as a one-off performance nor, originally, did I expect it would be a permanent change of clothes. I envisaged dressing as a woman occasionally, regularly at first for people to get used to it, but a little less frequently after a while. I expected the novelty would wear off. But it hasn't. Blockages in my psyche that I attribute to a lifelong investment in masculine presentations are unplugged and now that they are, I wouldn't want to plug them up again. The change that that first act of 'dressing' has brought about is now, two years later, evidently an integral part of my life. And my mind is still awhirl with the implications of this.

People ask, so how did the students react? The fact the question is asked at all underlines the reason this book needs to be written: that for all the media attention on trans celebrities and trans issues, this conventional style of clothing, a westernised feminine aesthetic, is nonetheless anything but conventional when worn openly, without allusions to parody, by a man. The question that male-to-female (MtF) cross-dressing raises is why, some fifty or so years after the sexual revolution, does a man in any item of adornment identified as feminine, or more specifically for women, still fascinate and disturb? The day I went to work dressed as a woman, the cat bolted from the bag, and so, with nothing now to hide, I can offer frank and unvarnished reflections on what it means to be a male who loves to wear (feminine) women's clothes, shoes and makeup and what happens when you do so openly. But this is a topic not so much about the individual as the society the individual has internalised. If my personal anecdotes, observations and reflections since dressing openly are to tell us anything, they must be considered alongside the society that makes my presentation unusual. It requires that we get beneath the surface of appearances. To this end, I turn to theories that enable us to shed critical light on human subjectivity, the material circumstances through which we make sense of our lives and the forces that stir inside us. I speak as a 'cross-dresser', gender 'non-normative', or, loosely defined, 'trans', 'gender queer' or 'gender variant' (all terms in my opinion are in one way or another problematic, including of course 'cross-dresser'), who was born and raised in a (westernised) capitalist society in which the norms and values of that society have through conquest and colonisation been imposed on the world. This is the hegemonic context in which from the perspective of a person, defined male, born in London into a white working-class family and now an academic working in New Zealand, I feel authorised to speak. Our relationship to gender and sexuality is of course complex and there are many different layers of human experience that require elucidation beyond what a book like this can achieve. But layers can nonetheless be sampled and the materials analysed to turn a personal story which seems trivial in isolation into a book of sociological relevance. I hope to demonstrate through the course of six chapters why male-to-female cross-dressing matters to us all.

When I was a little boy, still in my shorts, I dreamt of having my own Bat Cave. In my dream, I would slide down a pole hidden in my bedroom and enter a space full of women's clothes, boots, makeup and so forth that I would put on and roam around in freely. Later I would dream of a scenario such as the one in the film I Am Legend where Will Smith finds himself to be alone in the world. I would raid department stores and dress openly knowing there was nobody there to judge me. My childhood memories are full of examples of desires, which I felt a need to repress, for feminine things I wanted to wear. When I was 4, my older sister forced me to wear pink lipstick – I ran crying from the bathroom, the scene of my makeover. A year later at a male friend's house, I was playing a game that involved wearing lipstick. I refused to put it on; I wanted to, but the fear of my mother and older siblings finding out was enough to stop me. Around the same time, a female friend across the road showed off her new ankle boots. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Desires as trivial as these were repressed because they conflicted with gendered norms I was conscious of even at the age of 4. My story is not unusual.

When sequestered in the home, cross-dressing was like having a hobby one felt embarrassed about. Imagine being an adult into Lego. You buy a bucket of Lego on the pretext it is for someone else, a child; back home, when nobody's around, you pour the Lego out of the box in which you store your collection onto the carpet to play with. Once done, you guiltily scoop it hurriedly back into the box and, having double- and even triple-checked nothing's left lying around, hide it all under the bed. Occasionally, when the guilt really gets the better of you, you throw the box and all its contents into a bin far away from home knowing that you'll probably be buying more again later. Now that I dress outside of the home, there's nothing to hide, nor anything to feel guilty about. So I dress in women's clothes as often as possible, to the extent that colleagues are surprised to see me in men's clothes. The balance appears to have shifted. Now it feels like I'm cross-dressing when presenting as a man, just as it does when I dress as a woman, which is one of the reasons I use the description 'crisscross-dresser': the term invokes the idea that gender is in permanent negation and does not, like the term 'cross-dresser', imply that one is simply putting on and taking off a mask. All presentations are in this respect masks, with no authentic sex or gender beneath them (more on which later). For me, gender is now in permanent tension, from a masculine aesthetic to a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745337120
• ISBN 13: 9780745337128
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland