Faculty of Management Research Workshop: Ciara Cremin, University of Auckland

MAN-MADE WOMAN: A STYLISED REFUSAL OF PATRIARCHAL-CAPITALISM?

CIARA AKA COLIN CREMIN

Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from our exposure to trans people in the media, the stigma on male-to-female cross-dressing is as profound as it ever was. Evidence of this is all around you, in the workplace, on the train, in the supermarket. For I wager that in a typical day, maybe even in a typical year, in such situations you will not encounter a man in any item whatsoever that we think of as women’s. Not a dress, colourful makeup, tights or heels, nor even a simple bag for carrying items in called a handbag: what is this barrier in men that prevents them, except when accompanied by an alibi, from adopting such items into their repertoire? You may now be thinking of men you have seen wearing such items. They are what we call exceptions to the rule, exceptions that prove the rule: you remember them because they stand out like a sore thumb.
I stand out like a sore thumb. It took me the best part of 40 years to pluck up the courage to dress openly in women’s clothes. In doing so, I brought what for society ought to be hidden, or at best kept on stage, fully into the open. The effect reverberates upon the sensibilities of others that in turn affect my own. The purpose of this discussion is to draw my personal relationship to women’s clothes, and experiences of dressing openly ‘as a woman’ since 2015, into the orbit of a more universal one that negatively impacts us all: the structural relations that undergird and guarantee the gender binary in respect to which a stylised refusal is proposed.

Ciara aka Colin Cremin lectures in sociology at the University of Auckland. Working in the critical theory tradition, her research aims to map subjectivity in respect to the different moments in the circulation of capital. She is author of a number of books, including, in 2011, Capitalism’s New Clothes: Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis and, in 2015, Totalled: Salvaging the Future from the Wreckage of Capitalism. Now under the name of Ciara, her latest book, Man-Made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-dressing, is published with Pluto Press.

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