Academia Anthropology His Pretty Nails Psychodrama

Pantomime

September 12, 2017 by David 119 Comments

Speaking of sociology and its clown school connotations:

I will gladly sow gender confusion in kids. It’s my duty to.

So says Colin Cremin, a sociology lecturer who uses the workplace – and his colleagues and students – in order to indulge his transvestite kink:  

While I’m delighted to contribute to the breaking down of hetero-fascist biases, this was not the principal reason I started dressing to work as a woman. No doubt to the disappointment of colleagues in sociology, I never suffered from being born into the wrong gender… I dress as a woman because I like wearing women’s clothes. I like the look of the westernised feminine aesthetic. I like the feel of the silky fabrics on my body. I like the process of selecting outfits, matching up jewellery and shoes and putting on makeup.

And apparently all that fetishistic cosplay really needs an audience, preferably an involuntary one, during office hours. How terribly selfless.

Update, via the comments:

Dr Cremin doesn’t seem to grasp, or isn’t willing to admit, that his craving for public transgression – to, as he puts it, “sow gender confusion in kids” – by which he means young people over whom he has leverage – reveals quite a lot about his character. And his fitness to teach. I hate to sound prim, but if I were – God help me – a sociology student, I doubt I’d be reassured by the fact that my lecturer felt entitled to use the classroom as a venue for his transvestite fetish. It does rather suggest a pathological level of self-involvement and raises a suspicion that students may find themselves playing captive audience to – or being reluctant participants in – some personal psychodrama. A kind of power game. Some variation of, “I can do this and you can’t stop me without being accused of bigotry.” 

There’s a second interview with Dr Cremin here:

He doesn’t even want to “pass as a woman” when he dresses like one. He wants to be seen as obviously a man in a dress, in a deliberate challenge to the social norm. “By not ‘passing’, I draw attention to the fact that gender is a fluid concept,” he said.

And here’s another. In which we learn that the occasional “sideways look” is why Dr Cremin “needs to do it,” i.e., needs to continue his unconvincing drag act, thereby attracting more of those occasional sideways looks. The plan seems to be that fetishistic frock-wearing will eventually topple the Patriarchy. And capitalism, presumably. Readers will note, again, the need to attract attention, to impose on others and make them spectators, a reluctant audience. And then there’s the conceit that a balding middle-aged man in a frock and court shoes will somehow shake the world.

Dr Cremin, who is “partnered with a woman,” tells us that gender is “fluid” and that he doesn’t “think there is any intrinsic gender.” And yet his, shall we say, appetite isn’t to wear clothes with no obviously gendered connotations, or some mix-and-match. Instead, he likes to play at being a woman, or a caricature of one, by wearing stereotypically female clothing, those “silky fabrics” he adores – and make-up, and female jewellery, and long painted nails – while moving about and sitting at a desk as he thinks a woman would. For someone who doesn’t believe in intrinsic gender, it’s very gendered role-play.

Via Theophrastus.

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