King’s College London is pleased to host a one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘New Perspectives on the Menopause’. The conference will take place on Saturday 15 June 2024, from 9.45-18.00 in Bush House, Aldwych, London. Attendance at the conference is free of charge.

The aim of the conference is to bring together speakers and attendees from a range of disciplines, backgrounds and geographies in order to discuss recent developments in researching and understanding the menopause in diverse contexts, whether professional, medical, historical, cross-cultural or personal.

The conference will have four non-parallel panels that will broadly focus on the following areas: the experience of the menopause in different cultures and contexts; mediatic representations of the menopause; menopause in the workplace, including the plenary by Professor Kathleen Riach; and biocultural and historical discourses on the menopause.

PANEL 1: The Menopause: Existential and Experiential Dimensions

• The Existential Crisis - and Creative Possibilities - of Menopause (Stella Duffy)
• Menopause - A Cultural Perspective from the United Arab Emirates (Donna Howarth)
• Reappropriating the Menopause in Camille Froideveax-Metterie's Pleine et Douce/Replete and Tender (2023) (Julie Rodgers)
• Autographic Desires and Challenges: Francine Oomen's Déreglée: Journal d'une menopause/Riding the Wave (Anna Rocca)

PANEL 2: Media and the Menopause

• Véro Going Through 'The Change': Feminist Analysis of the Documentary Series Loto-Méno (2021) (Marie-Andrée Bergeron)
• Menopause in the UK News: Neoliberal Logics and Feminist Framings (Kate Gilchrist)
• 'First, I was frustrated, then I was tearful... but then I got angry': Menopause Mania and 'the Davina Effect' in the UK Menopause Market (Deborah Jermyn)

PANEL 3: Menopause and the Workplace

• Working Through Menopause in Kenya's Formal Sector: Intersectional Stigmas in a Patriarchal and Tribal Society (Ann Eleman and Belinda Steffan)
• Life After Menopause - Women's Return to Work and Labour Market Participation (Noemi Mantovan)

PLENARY: Alterity in Menopause: Organizing Changing Bodies Beyond a Hostile Character (Kathleen Riach, University of Glasgow)

PANEL 4: The Menopause: Biocultural and Historical Discourses

• Biocultural Understandings of Menopause: Insights from Japan (Melissa K. Melby)
• Broadening Perspectives on the Menopause Through Graphic Medicine: A Discussion of Menopause: A Comic Treatment (2020) (Felicity Moffat and Sarah Yousri)
• 'Black and Dark Smoke': The Blood of the Witch and the Blood of the Menopause in the Early Modern Era (Hetty Steele)
• Between Physiological Ageing and Deficiency Disease: Cultural, Medical and Scientific Conversations About the Menopause (Martina Zimmermann)

For all further enquiries please contact Professor Siobhán McIlvanney (siobhan.mcilvanney@kcl.ac.uk) or Felicity Moffat (felicity.moffat@kcl.ac.uk).

If you would like to attend, please register for free through Ticket Tailor.

Read more about the conference.