Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures

This book reveals how menopause is shaped—and misshaped—by the ways we socially and rhetorically construct menopause. By tracing menopause discourse across media, workplaces, caregiving, medical history, and health applications, Living Menopause invites scholars to rethink entrenched narratives and imagine more expansive, agency-affirming futures. Blending rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, and lived experience, Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures explores the forces that have long framed menopause as a problem to solve, a decline to fear, and a market to exploit. Against this backdrop, the authors craft expansive, agency-affirming futures for living with/and/through menopause.Across six chapters, the authors trace how menopause circulates through medical research, workplace expectations, caregiving pressures, health applications, and popular media. They show how decades of medicalization, beauty culture, and binary thinking through various “menobooms” have constrained what menopause can mean—and what women are allowed to feel, choose, or imagine during this transition.Living Menopause invites scholars and practitioners to join a conversation already underway—one that challenges stigma, expands agency, and opens new futures for how we understand and experience menopause. Ultimately, this book encourages readers to continue to critique and think outside current menopause discourse en route to imagining, constructing, and demanding new stories around the menopause experience.