‘Everything you need to embrace the change’: The ‘menopausal turn’ in contemporary UK culture

Abstract

In recent years, the UK has witnessed an unprecedented period of pronounced public cultural conversation and promotion around a newly inflected era of menopause awareness. Importantly, this ‘menopausal turn’, as I term it, can be identified in operation throughout multiple and intertwined cultural spaces, including education, politics, medicine, retail, publishing, journalism, and more. While this invigorated conversation might be welcomed at many levels, this article examines how it would be both naive and indeed hazardous to conflate the amplification of cultural attention to menopause and demand for greater provision of menopause support currently seen in the menopausal turn, with greater inclusivity. This shift in UK media discourse has been nowhere more apparent than in the preparedness of a significant number of high-profile women celebrities and public figures ready and willing to share their stories and lend their names to confessional menopausal disclosures of one kind or another. Adopting an intersectional feminist media studies approach, I particularly examine how understanding of menopause is being envisioned and bolstered through this celebrity prism as primarily the terrain of White, cisgendered, middle-class affluence - even aspiration at times - and insist this movement be identified and acted on by all those engaged in studying or shaping menopause in the media as a pressing matter of consequence, in order to advocate for more intersectionally-conscious accounts of menopause.