Jenny Appel
Jenny is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Human Geography at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Her research explores the everyday geographies of women experiencing menopause in eastern Germany, conceptualizing menopause as a form of reproductive ageing and reproduction as a lifelong, socially and spatially embedded process.
The project examines menopause as a lived and socio-spatial experience, focusing on how participants navigate bodily changes, uncertainty and liminality in their everyday lives. Particular attention is paid to how women anticipate menopause and how these anticipations shape their perceptions, practices and movements across private and public spaces. The analysis also considers how work, care responsibilities, health infrastructures and social inequalities shape the ways in which menopause is lived and negotiated. More broadly, Jenny’s work is guided by an interest in bodily and reproductive experiences that are often stigmatized, silenced or rendered invisible. Drawing on feminist and reproductive geographies, life-course perspectives and scholarship on ageing, she seeks to extend reproductive geography beyond a primary focus on fertility and the fertile phase of life.
This engagement with reproductive geography builds on earlier research on access to abortion in Halle (Saale), which examined the tensions that emerge when abortion access is conceptualized as an assemblage. The current focus on menopause continues this trajectory by turning to another frequently marginalized reproductive experience and further developing an understanding of reproduction as a lifelong process.
Jenny holds a master’s degree in International Area Studies and a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology.