RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
Contrarian cross-dressing concepts of the ‘man-made woman’
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
Man-made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-dressing
by Ciara Cremin
(Pluto Press, £16.99)
FIFTY years after the so-called sexual revolution, Ciara Cremin wants to know why “even a minor deviation from a masculine norm causes both fascination and revulsion.”
It’s a question that has a very personal origin for the author. Man-made Woman charts Cremin’s experience as a cross-dresser who likes to wear women’s and men’s clothing but, rather than being merely a memoir, it analyses gender politics in the context of feminism and sociology, the latter being the subject in which she lectures.
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