Refiguring Menopause

The menopause has never been a stable or singular phenomenon. What changes across time and culture are the frameworks through which it is explained, experienced and valued – from nineteenth-century diagnoses of “hysteria” and “involutional melancholia” to today’s celebrity-driven HRT culture and its critics. Refiguring Menopause brings together scholars and practitioners from across the arts, humanities and social sciences to examine menopause as a dynamic and contested terrain where biology and meaning continually remake one another.Ranging from witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe to comic art and graphic medicine, from Hilary Mantel’s writing on surgical menopause to the experiences of Black and Chinese-heritage women in the UK, the volume’s contributors challenge the dominance of biomedical and male-authored accounts and interrogate the workplace inequalities, cultural silences and structural ageism that shape mid-life womanhood. Organised around three recurring threads – language and representation, body and biology, and inequality and ageing – the collection resists any single account of “the menopause,” offering instead a genuinely interdisciplinary, pluralistic understanding of this life stage.As menopause continues to gain ground as a subject of critical and creative enquiry, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and students across gender studies, medical humanities and social gerontology, as well as sociological, cultural and literary studies of ageing and reproduction.Susan Pickard is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Ageing and the Life Course at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely in the field of ageing, health, gender and the life course. She is the author of previous monographs Age Studies (2016) and Age, Gender and Sexuality through the Lifecourse: The Girl in Time (2018).