Croning academics: menopause matters in higher education

ABSTRACT

This writing is born out of our experiences of becoming older women, academy hags, facing the performative demands of the neoliberalizing patriarchal university. We are raging. With the figure of the Crone, and feminist-killjoy-croning as our creative and livid research method (Ahmed, S. 2023. Feminist Killjoy. London: Penguin Random House), we squeeze time out/with impossible university spaces and schedules to tend to grey matters. This paper traces the normalization of menopause policies in workplaces and universities, following the social trending and capitalization of menopausal and ageing matters. We question what menopause policies do and argue they constitute a failed project for the advancement of gender equality and should be abandoned. Inspired by Barad’s (2021. “Dialogue with Karen Barad Dialogues on Agential Realism.” In Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging in Worldings through Research Practice, edited by H. P. Juelskjær and A. W. Stine, 118–141. London: Taylor and Francis) call to engage in ‘spacetimemattering’, we create webs of entanglement through the objects of university menopause policies. We grey, fade out/ fit in, sweat, bleed, scowl. Powered by fury and frustration, we scrape away the genealogical underpinnings of menopausal bodyminds.

KEYWORDS:

• Crone
• age
• menopause
• policy
• university

menopause (n.)

‘the final cessation of the monthly courses of women’, 1852 (from 1845 as a French word in English), from French ménopause, from medical Latin menopausis, from Greek mēn (genitive mēnos) ‘month’ (from PIE *mehnes – ‘moon, month’, from root me – (2) ‘to measure’, via the notion of the moon as the measurer of time) + pausis ‘a cessation, a pause’, from pauein ‘to cause to cease’, a word of uncertain etymology with no certain cognates outside Greek [Beekes]. Earlier it was change of life (1834) https://www.etymonline.com/word/menopause.

The change

Demographic change and ageing bodies in the workforce are troublesome. Currently, 19 per cent of those working in academia in the UK are over 56 years old (HESA 2023) and this is a matter of managerial concern, particularly when it comes to the employment of women. As the population ages, the number of women¹ over 50 in paid work is also growing (Statista 2024). Colliding into this ageing figure is the menopause,² commonly called the Change. Occurring on average around the age of 51 (NHS 2023), half the workforce faces this so-called ‘normal and natural’ life event at some time in their lives: a perfect storm of double trouble. Over the last 10 years, this trouble has been brewing, as the menopause has become something of a media phenomenon (Orgad and Rottenberg 2023; Rowson, Jaworska, and Gibas 2023), a workplace problem to be solved (Dennis and Hobson 2023; Rees et al. 2021) and now a site of political interest (HOC 2022, 2023). Fears of litigation (Myhill and Sang 2023), absenteeism, and loss of skills and talent from the workforce (Bazeley, Marren, and Shepard 2022) are driving employers to consider how to man-age the problem of the menopause.

Framed within an upbeat narrative, the public message is one of concern for those going through the menopause, often making direct reference to tackling any associated discrimination and harassment (see Rees et al. 2021). However, these seemingly sympathetic discourses serve to conceal age-related intersectional prejudice and challenges facing women employees throughout their working lives, and particularly those working into later life within the academy. The awareness raising and taboo busting headlines do little to challenge the framing of the menopause as a women’s problem that impacts on the academy. There are current concerns for the health of all academics in these increasingly pressured times. However, women academics carry higher teaching workloads and manage more students’ social and emotional needs, than their male counterparts, expending higher levels of emotional labour (Maguire and George 2021). Women in academia ordinarily face the challenge of being objectified (Fotaki 2013) and overlooked (Aiston and Kent Fo 2021) and this is exacerbated with age, as older women face even greater invisibility (Westwood 2023). How then, do these ageist and other prejudices play out, materially and discursively? Resisting neoliberal managerial expectations that we should be ever present and should self-remediate any matter that hinders our fully productive presence in the university, are themes that come to the fore in our deliberations and permeate this writing. We are r/ag(e)ing.

Lively accounts of becoming ageing academics provided the starting point for our croning feminist killjoy method. Sara Ahmed (2023, 22) puts it like this, ‘Perhaps the feminist killjoy is an ageing assignment, you become a hag as well as a nag’. Citing Mary Daly’s 1978 definition of the hag as ‘intractable’ and refusing to ‘yield to wooing’, with a force of refusal and non-compliance, Ahmed (2023) describes the hag as strident: ‘you become a hag by not yielding, whether to a sexual advance or another kind of advance; sexism can be an advance, how women are told to make themselves available to others’ (Ahmed 2023, 23). This incessant call to be caringly present and available drains us and undermines our very hagitude (Blackie 2022).

Railing or cackling by the photocopier or kettle, we share our greying stories; we speculate with and through feminist new materialism (Truman 2019). We understand the world from within, and that we are part of it, through agential realism (Barad 2021) and through creative, troubling posthumanism (Haraway 2016). Truman reminds us that thinking with concepts is also empirical research, and not at odds with foregrounding the liveliness of matter, nor with attention to subject formation and political activism. Material objects and archetypes (Becvar 2005) which come to matter are vital in our research. Captivated by the maddening matter of university menopause policies and surrounding publicity, we find ways to deeply hang out (Osgood 2019) in more remote university spaces, with policies, tables, pens, paper, laptops, laughter, books, sunlight coming through the windows, cake and tea. Travailing the countless seemingly similar UK university menopausal policies, we curse and fume at the iteration of associated practices and their dominant figuration: ‘symptomatic’, overheated, unregulated, menopausal bodyminds in need of support and adjustment to get back to ‘normal’. We refuse to allow the label to stick. We rankle as questions which emerge from assemblages of older female bodyminds (Merrell 2003), sanitary pads, HRT patches, leakages, euphemisms, menopause policies and their (un)reasonable adjustments, man-agers and toolkits, re-conceptualizing (The) Change. This assemblage is political. We concoct counter-narratives of the older woman, the hag, the Crone. We work closely together to think differently about older/Elder; about grey mattering practices, such as man-aging the menopause and our academic work.

Whilst little attention has been given to the mense at work other than the provision of free sanitary products, the menopause, it seems, requires greater man-age-ment. Hence menopause policies have become a firm fixture in the landscape of most large-scale workplaces; the NHS, the Police, AstraZeneca, the BBC, Royal Mail, Co-op, TSB and many more have signed up to the Menopause Workplace Pledge (Wellbeing of Women 2022). When Leicester University led the introduction of menopause policies in universities in 2017 (Beck, Brewis, and Davies 2021), an army of bullet pointed replicants were soon manufactured across the Higher Education landscape. Whilst we settle on four university policies from across the four nations of the United Kingdom for exemplification, they are by no means representational, their inclusion here, illustrative. Our approach, purposely unmethodical, a bumping into, a colliding with. We encountered many more, along with social media coverage, literature and mythology and Government reports, all of which in-forming and affecting the anger and rage that bubbles under the skin of this paper. We ask the Deleuzian question ‘what do menopause policies do’, highlighting and exemplifying how the policies work via symptoms, solutions and remediation. We show how these policies both amplify and minimize menopausal issues and how they pacify, patronize and otherise women in their creation of the menopausal figure at work in the academy. We see through these policies. Encouraged by Ahmed (2023, 173), we know that ‘feminist killjoys appear all the more forceful because of what we have to do to get through’. Our methods are croning.

Killjoy feminist croning activism

Steeped in mythologies, today the archetype of the Crone, like the menopause, is having a resurgence. The rise of the Crone is entangled too in the capitalization of ageing (Petersen 2018), and menopausing, a phenomenon that, for some, offers a well-being business or career opportunity (Larocca 2022). The Crone has come to represent many of the negative stereotypes associated with the ageing bodymind of the older woman in society. The Crone has many names in many places, such as Cailleach in Irish mythology, Baba Yaga in Slavic countries. Today the Crone is making an appearance everywhere, from conferences to literature, blogs to podcasts, self-help groups to personal coaching, as women of a certain age positively reclaim, monetize and/or weaponize the archetype (BBC 2023; Blackie 2022)

As three feminist killjoy Crones, more than used to ‘eye-rolling’ responses to our ranting (Ahmed 2023), we re/fuse to ‘travail alone’ (Le Guin 1997, 250), defying the implied neoliberal individualism. We are three ‘older’ women, fellow friends/academics at a UK university, actively concerned with age/ism, social exclusion in all its forms, interested in posthumanisms and feminist new materialisms and part of the Adventures in Posthumanism Network.³ We have ‘played with age’ in earlier research: enquiring how age/ing/ist practices come to matter in education, through relentless age categorization and segregation, through grey matters and revisioning age. We have explored framings of age in the university, marketed as spaces of youthful vigour, where promising futures might be born. We take a relational and material view of ageing, as described by Höppner and Urban (2018).

What might croning and the figure of the Crone offer the resistance to age discrimination and negative connotations associated with ageing which are exposed in this paper in attending to university menopause policies? Rather than problematizing and pathologizing the menopause, Blackie (2022) suggests that the Crone creates an opportunity for liberation and rebirth. She argues that where women have been shackled to feminine ideals of self-sacrifice and duty to others, voice curtailed, silenced or holding back with hesitation, the menopause and postmenopause bring ‘change’. Oestrogen and progesterone implicated, so too, testosterone; these hormones firmly establish the supple, fertile, re-productive body associated with youthful vitality. The Crone, largely deplete of these youthful proteins, is gnarled, dry, fickle, grumpy, less yielding and more strident. However, in the near absence of those youth nourishing hormones, Le Guin (1997) challenges those who dare become Crone; for the Elder, ‘the woman who is willing to make the Change must become pregnant with herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Few will help with that birth. The pregnancy is long, the labor is hard’ (Le Guin 1997, 250). However seductive such alternative narratives of the older woman might be, this ‘self’ is not isolated, the work not solitary or detached from the contexts and performativities of labouring and its demands. Our use of croning as method is, in part, about refusing a techno-rational impregnated, re-productive approach and more akin to an older way. Perez-Bustos (2017, p.b) advocates: thinking through with the work of unravelling and mending, with bodyminds fecund with ‘the making processes, labours, embodied learnings and materialities which constitute’ our knowing. It is with the unravelling of performativities we start.

The change: becoming (more) in/visible

Neoliberalism demands presence, academia particularly so. Self-promotion is an ageless expectation for academics, as old, young and indifferent find themselves under a constant pressure to increase visibility, to write, present, conference, network (Westoby et al. 2021). This presence, this academic identity work, is clearly underpinned by neoliberal individualism (Halberstam 2011), built on the stable, knowledgeable, unshakeable solidity of the subject (Han 2023). Yet age, intersecting with gender, race and other diversifying factors, vicariously renders those identifying as woman within the academy prior to the menopause, already less visible and expected to give and to yield. Women are silenced, overlooked and underrepresented in senior roles (Aiston and Kent Fo 2021; Bhopal 2014; Rollock 2021). Yet women academics carry the burden of ‘academic housework’, undertaking a greater proportion of teaching and pastoral work than their male counterparts (Heijstra, Steinthorsdóttir, and Einarsdóttir 2017). Whilst the emphasis in feminist research has often been on silencing, and the ways women have felt unheard, there is something about invisibility which is even more penetrating. Having a voice might give the impression of being in the room, with an opportunity to speak, if not to be heard. Invisibility is to be in the room and not even be seen or given the opportunity to speak. Meeting rooms and tables in those universities that purport to welcome and embrace difference, are drawn into the assemblage, through the rose-tinted device of diversity policies. As Ahmed writes:

Diversity is what you see through the glasses, a happy table, a shiny table, creating the impression that everyone can participate in the conversation […]This is how the table comes into view, when we don’t have a seat at it or when we are alienated by the conversation around it. (Ahmed 2023, 137)

Suspicious of all such policies and their objects of adjustments, we draw on Ahmed’s insights about diversity policies and complaints (Ahmed 2021) to question the current trend for menopause policies in institutions like universities. Ahmed calls for noticing as a form of political labour with which to hammer away.

To retreat from sight or to be seen and become the problem, the minor irritant to be dismissed for making ‘a fuss’, the feminist killjoy venting and ranting:

Killjoy equation: rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy. (Ahmed 2023, 24)

Rant, we say, rant until eyes roll: ‘It’s time to get angry again’. ‘Old age’, as Hall declares, ‘is not passive and peace-loving but brings a new belligerency’ (Hall cited in Woodward 2003, 59).

The Crone archetype represents an embodiment of instinctive ways of inner knowing, intuition and wisdom; the guide of others through transitions (Pinkola Estes 1992), So, in our croning, we rage and resist the continuing traps of tolerance of ‘harmful stereotyping’ (Barnhurst 2007), to lay bare the ‘shiny, happy table’ (Ahmed 2023). To make visible the policies which disappear the issues of non-valuing the ‘elder’ wits (witch) of women. These menopausal policies reduce possible conversations of bodymind disruption, by regulating monthly/occasional flows to formulaic reiterations of glossy smiling web images and representations which dis/serve wo/men, made ‘simultaneously socially invisible’.

We are dragged into a neoliberal ideal of aspirational self-improvement, a continual pull to doing more, being more successful, being hyper present. Being present, Han (2023) argues, is problematic; solidity, certainty and visibility embroil people in individualistic identity politics. Engaging in an ontological re-ordering of the world, Han challenges dominant orientations of presence. For the Far Eastern philosophies Han draws upon, the concept of absence is not a negative one. It offers an opening up, creating a ‘no space’, for space creates space, a wandering with immanence. Where presence is based on solidity and permanence, absence offers a way of being in the world in a different way ‘lives in the present, [s]he dwells in every present’ (Han 2023, 17). Certainly, for women academics, not only is this presencing even more about yielding, but permanence is a problematic concept; for the future is uncertain and change is a constant. In her magnificent podcast series, 28ish Days Later, telling what she calls ‘the whole bloody story’ (BBC 2022), India Rakusen challenges the thin masculinist norm of stable rationality and posits the thick, bloody, everchanging spectrum of female bodyminds.

The Male Midas touch: all that is meaningful turns to policy

It is hard to decipher when the menopause became an object of interest for the UK government and in turn workplace policy. With increasing numbers of women, and older women in particular, within the workforce, coupled with dramatic global demographic changes including an ageing population and shrinking birth rate (UN 2023), it is no surprise that supporting those going through the menopause has become a cause for concern. The first university menopause policy was born out of a government commissioned report (Brewis et al. 2017). Reviewing 26 years of literature relating to ‘menopause transition’ and women’s economic participation, the first Higher Education Menopause Policy grew out of Brewis et al. work, in 2017, in Leicester, the university in which the writers of the report originally worked. Many universities rapidly followed suit, and almost all now have a policy or guidelines in place. Job done. Enough un/said.

Coupled with this, in 2023, the UK government’s drive to keep older women in the workplace was reflected in the appointment of Helen Tomlinson as the first DWP Menopause Employment Champion, a voluntary post (DWP 2023). The term ‘champion’ is associated with defence, yes, but through male combat, with fighting and masculine competition, a curious label for such a post. Thus the menopause becomes a workplace enemy to be defeated; women can stay but their symptoms must be disappeared; becoming invisible again. In the brief time since becoming Menopause Champion, it is clear at the heart of this work is ensuring women are supported in their workplace in order that they can continue to produce. Curiously, the four-point plan Helen Tomlinson presented does not make explicit reference to policies, instead the focus is on more ‘strategic level approaches’, including sharing best practice, an ‘allyship programme’, and ‘a communications plan to improve the working lives of women in their sector, achieved by amplification through strategic partnerships’ (DWP 2023). Indeed ‘menopause policies’ per se are not a blanket recommendation for employers. The House of Commons Menopause and the Workplace Select Committee Inquiry held in 2022 was reported by the government in January 2023 (HoC 2023). The Inquiry recommended support to employers in the shape of creating model menopause policies under Recommendation 7. However, this recommendation was disregarded in the response published in January 2023, citing many ‘good’ examples where large employers such as the NHS were already doing this, highlighting ‘no one-size fits all approach to developing menopause-specific policies and guidance’ (HoC 2023, 21). The ambivalent approach towards menopause policies, placed the onus on employers to provide support activities and education; coupled with the reluctance of the government to change existing legislation. This is no surprise, given the reticence of the current UK government to involve the state within the workplace and private life, and a reflection of neoliberal ideology (Passy 2013), rather than an issue with menopause policies.

However, in spite of clear evidence of the variation in experience (Harlow, Burnett-Bowie, and Greendale 2022), menopause workplace policies in general, and HE policies in particular, are blanketing the menopause with a predominantly one size fits all approach. Likewise, Recommendation 9, which called for menopause leave, was similarly rejected, stressing the policy aims to support women going through the menopause to stay in work, and for employers to be enabled to do this.

 … we are focusing our efforts on disseminating best practice and encouraging employers to implement workplace menopause policies and other forms of support such as flexible working, which can play a vital role in supporting people to remain in work. (HoC 2023, 15)

Evidently, despite government reluctance to mandate menopause policies in the workplace, they continue to be advocated for, and have become the main vehicle through which the menopause in work is materialized. This, we argue, is problematic and serves to further pathologize the figure of the menopausal woman, whilst doing little to improve the lives of (older) women in the workplace or strengthen gender equality.

What menopause policies do

Temporal subjectification: the trouble with definitions

Temporality is problematic in menopausing. The policies we examined are full of temporal distortions which neatly segregate the menopause as a temporary state, a ‘going through’, a moment out of sorts, othered in respect of it being a time when, eventually, business will go back to normal. Much of the ‘Menopause At Work’ (MAW) writing exemplifies this temporal discourse reflected in workplace menopause policies as tasked with defining what the menopause is, when it starts and ends (Brewis et al. 2017). The unravelling of policies un/picked, all reflected a standard approach to definition, rarely straying far from commonalities of timing and chronology. The chronological menopause is a ‘biological stage’ ‘at the end of natural reproductive life, a cessation of periods and defined retrospectively as when an individual has ‘not menstruated for 12 consecutive months’. Average age is usually given as being 51, with caveats added for those undergoing surgery, experiencing premature menopause, or undergoing gender transition. Two further definitions are usually explored. The perimenopause, the time leading up to menopause, is difficult to identify as bleeding can be intermittent. Given that the menopause is defined in hindsight, identifying whether this is the menopause or perimenopause is problematic, postmenopause, likewise. Here this is almost universally defined as starting from when someone ‘has not had a period for 12 consecutive months’. Given the preoccupation with definition, it is the symptoms which become the focus for menopause policies.

Symptoms, outlined more in some policies than others, are experienced by 75% and more severely by 25% of those going through the menopause. These are a common occurrence in all three stages of the menopause; bloodiness, overheating, fogginess or fatigue. The biological, linear framing of the menopause expresses a masculine temporality, the male body, being the norm against which women’s bodies are measured (Atkinson, cited in Beck et al. 2023). Kairos, the cyclical temporality, challenges the linear hegemonic masculine time; always in transition, women’s bodies leak, discharge and haemorrhage. Like the tides which ebb and flow they are lunar, always in cyclical flux, un-reasonable, well before the menopause. The difficulty of determining the onset or the end of the menopause, and indeed the lack of interest in postmenopausal life, further inscribe valued norms of constancy, regularity and consistency rather than the undesirable norm of perpetual change and unpredictability experienced by female bodyminds. Unlike the idealized male bodymind in work, contained, rational, reasonable, regular, robust (Beck et al. 2023), the earthy corporeal biorhythms with their connections to nature, create a disruptive, ‘dirty’, and troublesome presence (Whiley et al. 2023).

The symptoms of the otherised problem (ageing)

Symptoms take centre stage in defining the menopause; symptoms make visible the otherwise hidden, private and undisclosed. They refuse to be contained. They pour out, fall out, leak out. They lay bare the menopausal bodymind in need of support, the menopause in need of man-aging. Reassuringly, supportive statements which open university menopause policies wish for the menopause to not be a ‘taboo’ or ‘hidden’ subject. They seek to create an environment where the menopause can be freely discussed and concerns and struggles brought to their manager to engage support. This openness, this space without shame and embarrassment, a key strategy, where people can ‘openly, comfortably, and confidently initiate conversations about the menopause and its symptoms’. Whilst workplaces create these ‘safe’ confessional enclosures, it is the menopausal figure who needs to come forward, to be ‘open in conversations with managers … in relation to how their symptoms are affecting them at work and what support may help them to manage them’. The expectation of self-governance, self-monitoring of the body, a technology of the self, a conduct of conduct (Foucault 1977), present too; encouraged to ‘make use of the support available via this policy through informed conversations with their line manager … ’. Here, as in other menopausal policies, the response-ability lies with the individual to ‘take personal responsibility for their own health and well-being’.

Yet the menopausal bodymind, in its journeying through academia has gathered ways of being, conscious and unconscious, which involve modifying corporeal happenings and needs to ensure an abiotic bodymind in work existence: one that emulates a masculinist rational and controlled bodymind. This ‘organizational co-modification’ explored by Beck et al. (2023) in their review of cis-female bodies in work literature, includes self-disciplining of the body to meet workplace expectations not just around the aesthetic but the physical body too. They highlight the strategies used to ‘dim’ the body, to render it invisible (or less visible) in light of the male gaze, creating what Forbes (cited in Beck et al. 2023) calls the ‘visibility paradox’. Here success in the workplace requires a visibility greater than male counterparts, running counterintuitive to the dimming of the physical. This struggle is complex, as Barnhurst (2007, 1) identifies,

The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, and converting radicalism into a market niche.

It is through menopause policies that the ageing female bodymind is materialized and made visible in the workplace and it is all the above but not, we argue, a paradox nor a dichotomous positioning of visible/invisible. It is an entanglement of bodyminds, of biology, of menopause with its chronological attachment, of reaching a certain age, of the history of these male-dominated spaces, of ageist societal attitudes which seep into and out of the fabric of these youth orientated organizations.

Those experiencing the menopause or menopausal symptoms are ‘encouraged’, through a responsiblizing narrative, to ‘be open’, especially about how it is impacting on them. Lurking in the background of the rationale for these policies is also the fear of litigation; so, whilst policies wish to support workers and managers, they also seek to protect the organization from claims brought about by women citing menopause within Employment Tribunals (Myhill and Sang 2023).

Deeply embedded in this man-agerialism is the recording of conversations albeit confidential, agreeing actions and accommodations, reviewing at a future date, and where necessary, referral to occupational health. The gaze widens. The drive to keep women in work, central to the policies. With the recommendations of the Select Committee for menopause leave rejected by the Government (HOC 2023), the focus is on enabling women to stay in work, despite the most challenging of circumstances. Accommodations, adjustments, workarounds, providing facilities, flexibility to attend appointments are all couched in the language of ‘reasonableness’. Through menopause policies a certain kind of ‘menopausal figure’ is produced: a figure in need of information, accommodation, pacification, ventilation and medicalization, a figure in need of fixing. These policies amplify the sense of a deficient, declining, and no longer fertile bodymind and at the same time, through the focus on fixing such bodymind ‘problems’, minimize the deep structural and systemic issues that women constantly face in the workplace, whether they are menopausal or not. As less seen crones perched in sideline spaces, we heckle and trouble the glossy places of poli(te)cy conversations, croning as feminist killjoys, to disrupt with saying what is silently there, what remains unsaid, queering the pitch of accepted wisdom. Croning ‘besides ourselves’ (Butler 2004) with our rage, unravelling these policies to trouble, to make trouble, to get into the trouble of not queering these troubling ways of putting the woman-bodymind in its place.

The unknowing bodymind

University menopause policies propose easy practical fixes to menopausal symptoms, such as provision of desk fans, water fountains, noise-reducing headphones, pauses away from the desk, better ventilation or proximity to windows. They indicate women do not know themselves or how to talk about what they need with, for example their line manager, colleagues or GP. Menopausal women are also painted as deficient in knowing themselves or understanding their changing bodies, infantilized through a familiar misogynistic move. Guidance produced for managers within menopause policies suggest some women may ‘not recognize themselves that they are symptomatic’. This patronising gaze regards them as so diminished as to be incapable of helping themselves. Managers are thus positioned as being in a better place/more knowledgeable/more able to recognize the symptoms as being menopausal than women themselves. After all they have been educated via the policies, knowing more and being more ‘objective’, standing outside of the unreasonable, irrational bodymind. We argue that this so-called ‘education’ reinforced by the recommendations of the Select Committee and the main focus for government response, patronizes and infantilizes those experiencing menopause. Docile, teachable bodies in work (Foucault 1977); ‘trading assimilation for equality’ (Barnhurst 2007, 1).

Tied to performance, something draws managers’ attention to this unknowing; the exposure of the unknowing bodymind is likely to occur in spaces of evaluation, such as performance reviews or sickness interviews. There is little consideration as to whether these forms of surveillance directly impact on the experience of the menopause. Alaimo speaks of ‘enmeshment of self in place’, as ‘bodies extend into places and places affect bodies’ (Kuznetski and Alaimo 2020, 140). The bodymind is clearly separated from the place of work. Hidden is the transcorporeality of the bodyinwork. The bodyinwork is expected to expose elements of bodily functions which get in the way of mindinwork being fully productive. The mindinwork, conscious of the dangers that exposing the bodyinwork creates, the pastoral power of the confessional (Foucault 1977) hovers expectantly. As the ‘good’ worker submits to the expectation, sharing one’s issues exposes one as knowing, whereas the holding on to privacy, withholding knowledge of one's body, creates in the mind of the manager an unknowing of the body. The bodymind is caught in this knowing of the unknowing.

Policies, therefore, enable ‘the continuance of the dominance of white male voices, patriarchal frameworks and languages’ (Morris et al. 2022, 102), a missed opportunity to create openings to disturb and do otherwise. The policies instead repeat a pattern of wording, together with webpage images, which renders women of all ages, ‘simultaneously socially invisible while being physically and psychologically visible, an object of the gaze’ (Reay and Ball 2000, 147). The picture created by the overarching male-institution-speak is for women to be well-beings, well behaved, bloodless, whole-some bodyminds: smile or die (Ehrenreich 2010). The policies continue to present a sanitized version of ‘menopausal women’ as a collective, and as a reimagined 1950s version of the ‘good wife’, so we can ‘re-perform the socially permitted version of femininity’ (Whiley et al. 2023, 901).

Sanitized solutions: being institutionally HRT’d

The patch sits comfortably against my skin, entangled with acrylic adhesive and guar gum, 3.2 mg of estradiol and 11.2 mg norethisterone acetate, a yellow spec on the murky laminate film. Translucent, so as not to be visible, except for the black adhesive ghost rim, left from each application. This patch holds me in this place, this place of work. I am grateful for the holding back of the hot flushes, the palpitations, the brain fog, time. The patch allows me to continue to be pro, if not re-pro-ductive, economically viable, untroubling. I am contained and held here, for now. (Author's personal reflection provoked through the writing of this paper)

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is presented as a solution to the problem of menopausal symptoms in policies examined for this paper; with visiting a GP to discuss symptoms and treatments, suggesting an expectation. This is also reflected in the government’s own response to the Select Committee Inquiry (HOC 2023). Driven predominantly by the male medical gaze and experimental intrusions on human and more-than-human bodies the path to current forms of hormone replacement therapy has a troubled history: ‘terrible human and bovine histories’ (Haraway 2016, 110). By the 1890s, ‘sex hormone therapies’ in both powder and pill form were being manufactured (Kohn et al. 2019). Yet this slice of history is not a thin slice of Then but entangled in the ‘thick Now’ (Barad 2020, 134), a ‘thick present’ of bodies, human and non-human, coerced, unwitting donors, dried, pounded, powdered, bi-products of other for-human industries. Not past, but a ‘transcorporeal stretching between present, future and past’, where women’s bodies ‘archive’ these past abuses in the name of science (Neimanis and Lowen Walker 2014, 561). Stir into this, mix, pound and grind, hedge-funds, investments, profits, and the global hormone replacement industry is worth 21.28 billion US dollars, of which oestrogen and progesterone replacements account for 54.34% (Grand View Research 2023). In England, the National Health Business Authority estimates in the year to 2022, 7.8 million HRT products were prescribed, a 31% increase in the previous year (NHBA 2022). Capitalizing on an increasing aged population and diminished fears for the safety of these products (Cagnacci and Venier 2019) means big business. The main message to women can be first read as there being something drastically wrong with them (depleted hormones) which needs medical intervention (hormone replacement). HRT within the policies examined becomes a solution to solve the problem of the menopause for those in the workplace. Whilst the menopause and its embodied effects are reality for many women, it is the biopolitics of these ‘changes’ which are troubling.

The problem with “being good” to the extreme is that it does not resolve the underlying shadow issue,  … [and] will rise like a tsunami, … destroying everything in its path. In “being good”, a woman closes her eyes to everything obdurate, distorted, or damaging around her, and just “tries to live with it.” Her attempts to accept this abnormal state further injure her instincts to react, point out, change, make impact on what is not right, what is not just (Pinkola Estes 1992, 242)

The great trouble with the policies is that they coerce a ‘non-performativity: how words do not bring into effect what they name’ (Ahmed 2023), but the crone on the sidelines can call this out, can queer this pitch, this politic space. Such spaces could have more engaged, visible and prized presence of women and their bodies, as they contend with their leaky, bloated, cramps bludgeoning battering of monthly menses, and the period known as the Menopause, with the peaks and troughs of their creative vitality and significant power. The menopause might be ‘temporary’, but together with the perimenopausal stage, a fifth or sixth of a woman’s life span.

Rage against the machine

We know we should be grateful, be accommodating, and accept that menopausal policies are trying to do something, and something is surely better than nothing. ‘Come on be reason-able, be respons-able, be accept-able’; we feel eyes rolling. But the something they do is damaging and we are raging. There is a wild wilfulness in our protests (Ahmed 2017, 66) ‘asserting or disposed to assert one's will against persuasion, instruction or command’ (we are not persuaded), ‘governed by will without regard to reason’ (we stand against reason), ‘determined to take one’s own way’ (and not one dictated by failed policy), ‘obstinately self-willed or perverse’ (in unison).

The Crone resists the good wifely academic accommodating of the policy on a page which sits somewhere on the web but not present in the lived lives of diverse experiences of being older women with powerful flushing, sweating, shitting, bleeding, hurting, aching, itching, bloating, pee-leaking, bodies. The Crone sees through the supposed value of being the warrior ‘like’ (but not as deserving) Valkyrian women, who ride to clear the bloody battlefields of worthy men, guiding them to the glory in the Valhalla whilst then returning to their assigned domestic tasks below on the gory grounds of slog and struggle. Their rewards to serve. We are raging. It’s time to leave cleaning up the messy, to resist the discomforting, the so-called disgusting, and decolonize women’s bodies and voices – get angry – be belligerent. ‘Failure to accommodate’? We refuse to be accommodated ‘an Other is always pushed aside, marginalized, forcibly homogenized, and devalued as [Western] cognitive machinery does its work’ (Foucault, cited in White 1991, 919).

So much more

Through our killjoy croning of university menopause policies we have moved the discussion beyond the installation of policy solutions, beyond the critique of these policies and beyond the discourse of resistance. We have argued that through the presentation of the menopause as a variable collection of symptoms to be man-aged, menopause policies and their solutions hide bigger and wider problems of gender inequality and ageism in the academy. We have exemplified the ways in which these policies engage in symptomania, sanitizing and minimizing menopausal events whilst patronizing and pacifying those who experience them. Steeped in symbolic violence, the consequences of these policies reinforce neoliberal expectations of performativity, with its demands for presence while continuing to silence and obscure the work of women. In doing so we argue the creation, enactment and materializing of menopause policies are not just problematic but dangerous. They are mind(body)less formulaic, simplistic, shallow, misogynistic. Rather than extending gender equality, they continue the systemic workplace ageism and sexism, separating out and atomizing ‘the problem’, continuing to feed masculine culture.

Menopause policies materialize the ageing bodyminds of women within academia. The idea of slowing down, becoming less productive or visible is concealed beneath a veneer of continuing to present the academic self as youthful, able, and present. The menopause is temporally constructed within menopause policies as something, a finite period, to be got through (with the help of a bit of HRT, TLC, H₂O and ventilation), with becoming postmenopausal signalling a return to business-as-usual, full production resumed. We have argued the older female bodymind policies bring into focus is one that bears symptoms: unproductive, unreliable, unreasonable and in need of man-aging. What is not just out of focus, but completely overlooked, is what this croning bodymind brings to the table.

We make no requests for ‘reasonable adjustments’, rather we argue for an abandoning of menopause policy in its exposure of women’s age and to age-related stereotyping. In its reductionist instrumentalism, menopause policy discriminates against women of a certain age and does nothing to further gender equality. Croning as method and feminist-killjoy-croning in particular calls to others to create a space, a queer space as Ahmed shouts for, where the quotidian, mundane, cyclical is re-imagined; a clearing of space for possibilities to grow.

As disappointed croning academics, we call to others likewise, to shout, why is this being allowed to happen in these university spaces of thinking and doing differently? We expect and are already creating so much more. So much more, as our colleague Helen Bowstead (2023) writes so strikingly in her doctoral thesis:

I watch the England footballers. They are determined. Skilful. Aggressive. I wonder how they discipline their bodies to keep those shorts so white. No periods on the pitch. No place for stomach cramps or heavy bleeds. We gain so much and gain so little.

Stuff period poverty, I say over dinner, I want period reality. Women menstruate. Full stop. Period.

What do you want to change, my husband asks?

Everything, I say. Everything needs to change. Of course, sanitary products should be free. Available to all. All the time. Of course. But it is more than that. So much more. (Bowstead 2023, 46)

Acknowledgements

We would especially like to thank the members and visitors to the University of Plymouth’s Adventures in Post-humanism group for their lively contributions and debates, all of which are woven into the fabric of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie Lavelle

Marie Lavelle is a lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at the University of Plymouth. Her research interests are informed by new materialist and post-humanist philosophies which are currently focused on children’s entanglements with the sea and grand mothering.

Joanna Haynes

Joanna Haynes is an associate professor of Education at the University of Plymouth. Her research interests are in community, intra-generational relations and democratic education, philosophy and childhood. She co-leads the Adventures in Posthumanism Research Network.

Emma Macleod-Johnstone

Emma Macleod-Johnstone is a lecturer in Education at the University of Plymouth. Her research interests are informed by feminisms, Jungian psychology, and the complexities of being entangled, embodied ‘well’ beings.

Notes

1 Wherever the term ‘woman or women’ is used in this paper, it denotes those who identify as women, including transgender women unless otherwise indicated in cases where research cited does not make this clear.

2 In this paper, the term includes all people who may go through the menopause including those assigned female at birth who identify as a woman, transgender women and those who do not identify as a woman and who are experiencing the menopause, for example those identifying as non-binary, and/or transgender and inter-sex people.

3 See https://adventuresinposthum.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/posthuman-revisioning-of-age-and-learning/.