MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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Contrarian cross-dressing concepts of the ‘man-made woman’
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
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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