Hot flashes, night sweats, palpitations, vulvovaginal dryness, urinary problems, fatigue, insomnia, irritability, anxiety, joint pain, increased risk of developing osteoporosis or cardiovascular disease… This long list of symptoms often holds place of definition of menopause. Marked by the definitive cessation of menstruation, this natural stage of biological aging can occur sooner or later in a woman’s life, abruptly or gradually. In our contemporary societies, it is most commonly considered as a hormonal disorder that may be subject to medical monitoring, sometimes treatment.
However, menopause cannot be reduced to these physical manifestations alone. In the same way that the appearance of menstruation signals, in many cultures, the entry into adulthood and, above all, into femininity – menstruation, fertility and femininity are often inextricably linked – menopause is generally seen as one of the first signs of aging. However, it can occur very early in a person’s life; above all, if menstruation affects women at puberty, what happens to them when they stop?
Neither more nor less than a ghost in the eyes of the American poet Mary Ruefle, as she writes in a text entitled Break and published in the collection My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016, untranslated): “Whether you were attractive or not, you got used to feeling other people’s eyes on you while you waited for the bus or bought tampons at the pharmacy. They were looking at you to determine if you were attractive or not, so either way, you were being looked at. Those times are over; from now on the gaze of others passes through you, you are completely invisible to their eyes, you have become a ghost. You no longer exist. »
Not all menopausal people, of course, share Mary Ruefle’s views. Nevertheless, whether experienced as a decline or as a liberation, this experience demonstrates how menopause is a social phenomenon at least as much as a biological one.
“There is no question of invalidating the bodily manifestations that can occur during menopause, or of saying that menopause does not bring about any physiological transformationspecifies Cécile Charlap, lecturer in sociology at Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University, and author of The Menopause Factory (CNRS Editions, 2019). But, if we take an analytical look at the descriptions of menopause in medical works, we see that they carry social representations which greatly influence the way we perceive this period of life. »
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