Daily Dose: 200

Feminism in 3D: Defy, Disobey, Disrupt

Logo: Sheyam Ghieth

“So much of what we are encouraged to focus on with the menopause transition is what ceases, what stops happening. The loudest menopause narratives are about who we stop being – women who can reproduce. The cessation of menstrual periods and the end of the reproductive phase. It is the biology of menopause and the resulting societal implications that we are encouraged to focus on. Indeed, even the purpose of menopause is explained by its evolutionary benefit to others, from the ‘mother hypothesis’, which holds that older mothers benefit more from investing in their current children rather than in continuing to reproduce themselves, to the ‘grandmother hypothesis’, which argues that grandmothers have a benefit to the reproductive success of their children and improve the survival and wellbeing of their grandchildren. What doesn’t seem to get anywhere near as much attention is what is the meaning of the menopause for women. In other words, what does it mean for a woman to live through perimenopause, menopause and into postmenopause? What do these phases (which for this piece I will refer to broadly as the menopause or the menopause transition) mean for her life? For our lives? What continues flowing? Somehow, even in this uniquely female life process – and it is a process, not an event – women and women’s lives have become incidental. While recognising that it is all people with ovaries who experience menopause, I will use the term ‘women’ in this piece because I am more concerned with the gendered social and societal implications of the menopause transition as opposed to the physical biological process,” Marilyn Muthoni Kamuru, The Menopause: When We Are Free, Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, Edited by Mona Eltahawy