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. 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.