The Sociological Review

Menopausal transition (MT) is often described in medical terms or treated as a private matter, but it also characterises women’s working lives. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, this cross-cultural study explores how institutional and cultural structures influence women’s agency and how women’s everyday practices reproduce and, at times, reshape these structures in the workplace during MT. Based on 51 semi-structured interviews with working women in France, Germany and Türkiye, we explore how women negotiate the experience of menopause in the context of the workplace amidst physical, emotional and cultural challenges. The findings reveal similarities between the contexts: in all three countries, women reported that formal support through workplace policies and healthcare was limited, and even when formal workplace structures were in place, cultural taboos often made it difficult to talk openly about menopause. Women described their MT mostly as positive and described that they sought support through informal networks, e.g. talked to trusted colleagues, adapted their work routines and developed personal coping strategies. Nevertheless, there were nuanced national differences in women’s interpretation of MT: French participants often associated it with loss of femininity, Turkish participants with loss of fertility and German participants with declining productivity, indicating the importance of recognising menopause as both a public and professional issue, as this framing can influence how women experience and shape their working lives.

This article uses artivist methods such as feminist cartooning and body mapping to examine the diversity of racialised women’s menopause knowledge and experiences in the UK, Sweden and India, noting how these are varied and need to be understood contextually against the larger frame of their life experiences. We take as our starting point the menopause discourse prevalent in mainstream media and workplace initiatives in the UK, noting that it is still largely white and middle-class. To widen and decolonise this anglophone discourse, we employ artivist methods in enunciating the menopause experiences of racialised immigrant women in Sweden and Dalit working-class women in India. In both Sweden and India, we deployed feminist cartooning to produce comic strips in one case and body mapping in the other to elicit marginal women’s experiences to not just broaden the anglophone discourse but also to reimagine menopause. We argue that between them, UK, Sweden and India are representative of the unevenness of menopause discourse and activism. In comparison to the UK, a forerunner, Sweden represents a middle ground where the questions of menopause have begun to emerge in the last decade via the issue of women’s health and sick leave, whereas in India the discourse and menopause policy is yet to concretise. This article is grounded in our involvement in the AHRC-funded research network, MAUSI Net: Menopause Artivism in the UK, Sweden and India, which brings together feminist scholars from these three different country contexts.

This article demonstrates the lasting value of C.W. Mills’ sociological imagination in understanding how intimate bodily realities and biography intersect with, and are shaped by, larger social realities, and the agency we have as individuals to affect these realities – in my case, through art. In this autoethnographic piece, I discuss my personal journey, as a feminist artist, of reimagining menopause through the dismantling of my artistic practice and creation of the Menopause Punk Song. I situate my journey within intergenerational dynamics, as well as the broader social realities and structures, including gendered ageism, body appearance pressures, the cultural moment of menopause’s visibility, art as a practice and the Covid-19 pandemic, which coincided with my menopause. I consider the frustrations and critiques that animated the Menopause Punk Song art project and the pleasures and problems its creation and performance entailed.

This article explores how menopause can be creatively reimagined through collective, embodied practices that challenge the limitations of contemporary cultural understandings of menopause. It argues that experiences of menopause can be transformed through practices that emphasise emplacement – siting or situating menopausal experiences within specific landscapes – and through shared activities that foster reflection, solidarity and empowerment. By foregrounding embodied and situated knowledge, the article contributes to sociological debates on creative and participatory methodologies, demonstrating how practices such as walking can ground abstract sociological theory and generate new ways of understanding lived experience. The article takes the form of a visual essay that reflects on the creative process of developing ‘better ways’ of experiencing and ‘doing’ menopause – approaches that seek to enhance the physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing of those undergoing this life transition. It focuses on a series of menopause-oriented walks entitled Walking the Menopause, in which rural landscapes become sites for reflection and collective meaning-making. Methodologically, the article draws on creative practices including mapping, drawing and walking. It examines three walks in particular: one developed in response to my own experience of surgical menopause, a one-to-one walk, and a group walk incorporating the experiences of other women.