Publications
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
In the 21st century, global demographics are rapidly changing, with a higher population of middle-aged people than ever before. As the ‘sandwich’ generation, people in midlife often experience significant work and intergenerational caring responsibilities, yet they are the subject of relatively little research.
This short, accessible book redresses the balance in offering a geographical approach to how people embody and claim space in midlife while analysing the influences of gender, class and location. The author considers midlife in varying sociocultural and geographical contexts, viewed through the lens of the global neoliberal shift.
“Stunningly original and also deeply personal, Aija Lulle’s feminist-inspired exploration of the geographies of the midlife generation, interposed between youth and older-age, opens up new perspectives on global demography.” Russell King, University of Sussex
“This engaging and highly readable book provides important insights into midlife from citizens of the UK, Finland and Latvia.” Irene Hardill, Northumbria University
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
The research aimed to increase understanding of the gendered dimensions of health and wellbeing concerning the transition to menopause within the work environment by using a case study of Canadian physiotherapists. Informed by feminist geography and engaging qualitative methods to address the following objectives: 1) to examine the relationships between aging, gender, health, and wellbeing in the workplace, 2) to explore the experiences of perimenopause for physiotherapists in the Canadian work environment, and 3) to document the perceptions of existing structural support(s) in the workplace shaping physiotherapist’s experiences with the menopause transition.