Reimagining Menopause – Mobilising radical imaginaries across social, creative and clinical domains

While many areas of reproductive health have been radically transformed by social and medical progress, menopause has remained stubbornly attached to conventional scripts and social norms about gender, sexuality, and the life course.

Project aims

To build new connections between health sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and creative arts researchers with an interest in critical menopause studies.
To develop speculative probes and workshop activities for healthcare providers to understand the dynamic menopause experiences of gender, sexuality, and bodily diverse people.
To develop protocols for healthcare providers to provide advice on menopause that is aligned with gender affirmation principles among gender diverse people.

Project is supported by a TASA workshop grant, UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture (Paddington campus) hosted a workshop exploring how narratives and responses to menopause, and other acute hormonal fluctuations in later life, can be made more inclusive of those whose bodies, identities or experiences are an uneasy fit with social norms, particularly compulsory heterosexuality, cisgenderism, and parenthood.

More about the project

Research Team

Kerryn Drysdale

Senior Research Fellow

University of New South Wales

Christy Newman

Professor and Associate Dean (Engagement and Impact)

University of New South Wales

Katherine Moline

Associate Professor

University of New South Wales

Related publications

Katherine Moline & Teena Clerke (18 Oct 2023): Design research for menopause: a scoping review, Design for Health.

Abstract

More than half the global population experience menopause, of which a significant number are in part-time or full-time employment. Research on labour force participation reports that employment is often interrupted during the menopausal transition due to difficulties accessing timely medical support and social discrimination. These interruptions result in the loss of professional expertise for employers and financial security for employees. To identify the characteristics of and gaps in design research for menopause we conducted a scoping review of the literature. We sourced and analysed 24 articles, mapping them according to their alignment with three conceptual framings of menopause from the sociology of medicine; a medicalized condition requiring pharmacological treatment, a natural life stage that is managed with complementary therapies, and a demedicalized issue where illness and health are framed as always socially situated. We found that the articles on menopause were relatively evenly distributed across the medicalized and demedicalized framings, with fewer developed within a natural framing. Our findings offer design researchers an overview of frameworks that are commonly used in health research and that we see as productive for further multidisciplinary research collaborations for menopause, and for research concerning the intersections of gender, sexualities, ageing and health more broadly.

Link / DOI: 10.1080/24735132.2023.2265714

Kerryn Drysdale, I. Burton-Clark & Katherine Moline (20 Jan 2025): Reimagining menopause by expanding assumptions shaping research: a scoping review of gender and sexuality diverse people’s experiences and expectations, International Journal of Transgender Health

Abstract

Background: Menopause is socially coded as an experience of hormonal change which threatens the vitality and identity of (cisgender) women in midlife; yet this framing overlooks the diversity in menopause experiences across age, gender and sexuality. The significance of these less visible experiences has led to calls to broaden the scope of menopause narratives and representations across research, policy, and practice. Methods: Using an established scoping review methodology, we identified eleven articles that reported empirical research from the perspectives and/or experiences of menopause among gender diverse people (which we widened to include sexuality diverse people where some analyses were equally relevant for gender diverse people). Results: Three thematic categories were produced through our analysis, each implying a provocative expansion of assumptions about specific elements of the menopause experience, namely: timing of symptomology, gender and hormones, and sexuality and reproduction. Underpinning these findings is a pressing need for an alternative way of approaching menopause beyond its clinical characteristics, which, in turn, is carried over to the research that evidences these characteristics. Conclusions: The centering of accounts of menopause that assume cisgender and heterosexual women’s experiences to be both normative and normal constrain other social (re)imaginings. We argue for more expansive understandings of menopause beyond this normative and clinical framing to consider the more fulsome breadth of socially situated experiences and perspectives that better serves the needs of gender diverse people.

Link / DOI: 10.1080/26895269.2024.2447785