Disrupting Menopause: A Queer Feminist Analysis of LGBTQ+ Experiences

This thesis reconceptualises menopause through a queer feminist lens which questions many of the dominant assumptions about menopause. Feminist research into menopause has produced numerous studies examining the problems of its stigmatisation and biomedicalisation but which have focussed primarily on the experiences of cisgender heterosexual women. This thesis addresses this by centring the menopause experiences of people who identify as LGBTQ+.

Sixteen participants were invited to create a body map in advance of a semi-structured interview. Body mapping allowed participants to create a visual representation of their menopause experience and foregrounded the experience of menopause an embodied phenomenon. These methods were designed to broadly explore LGBTQ+ experiences of menopause, and to specifically examine how menopause interacts with experiences of the body along the axes of gender and sexuality.
Examined through reflexive thematic analysis, the findings of this study demonstrate that menopause can be conceptualised as a disruptive experience. That menopause is disruptive does not mean that participants found menopause to be wholly unpleasant as participants often reported menopause to be a complex experience which elicited nuanced, ambivalent emotions and which some participants experienced as a predominantly positive experience. Considered through the lens of LGBTQ+ experiences, menopause can be understood as disruptive in the way it challenges the lay-expert knowledge binary and illuminates the insufficiencies of biomedical knowledge around menopause; disrupts straight time through its production of disordered temporalities; and troubles societal norms and ideals of femininity and womanhood as it destabilised the gender binary and prompted re-examinations of participants’ gender identities.

The contributions of the thesis include the development of the concept “transgender phenomenon” to encompass the ways in which menopause challenges sex/gender binaries; the utilisation of body mapping as a productive research method which also benefits participants; and furthering a dialogue between queer and feminist thought around biomedicalisation, knowledge, temporality and gender.