Living Menopause

Blending rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, and lived experience, Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures explores the forces that have long framed menopause as a problem to solve, a decline to fear, and a market to exploit. Against this backdrop, the authors craft expansive, agency-affirming futures for living with/and/through menopause.
Across six chapters, the authors trace how menopause circulates through medical research, workplace expectations, caregiving pressures, health applications, and popular media. They show how decades of medicalization, beauty culture, and binary thinking through various "menobooms" have constrained what menopause can mean-and what women are allowed to feel, choose, or imagine during this transition.
Living Menopause invites scholars and practitioners to join a conversation already underway-one that challenges stigma, expands agency, and opens new futures for how we understand and experience menopause. Ultimately, this book encourages readers to continue to critique and think outside current menopause discourse en route to imagining, constructing, and demanding new stories around the menopause experience.

Lori Beth De Hertogh is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the School of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication at James Madison University, USA.
Ann E. Green is Professor of English and Writing at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, USA.
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch is Professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, USA.
Laura R. Micciche is Professor of English and area director of the rhetoric and composition graduate program at the University of Cincinnati, USA.
Cathryn Molloy is Professor of Writing Studies in the English department at the University of Delaware, USA.
Bryna Siegel Finer is Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Writing Programs at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Jamie White-Farnham is Professor in the Writing Program and serves as Director of Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, USA.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Living With/And/Through Menopause
1. My Body/My Mother's Body: Caregiving During Menopause
Anne E. Green (Saint Joseph's University, US)
2. The Women's Health Initiative Study: A Rhetorical History
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch (Saint Joseph's University, US)
3. The Grappling is Happening: The Multiple Menopause Discourses of Television
Jamie White-Farnham (University of Wisconsin-Superior, US)
4. "I had NO idea:" Rhetorics of Choice and the Effects of Surgical Menopause
Bryna Siegel Finer (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, US)
5. Hushed Rhetorics and Menopausal Teachers: "It's super taboo, let's be honest"
Laura R. Micciche (University of Cincinnati, US)
6. "Capitalism Has Gotten Its Hooks into Menopause and Wants to Shake It Until Money Falls Out:" Rhetorical Consequences of Monetizing Menopause
Lori Beth De Hertogh (James Madison University, US) and Cathryn Molloy (University of Delaware, US)
Conclusion. The Future of Menopause
Appendix A. Survey Questions
Appendix B. Quantitative Data
Index
About the Authors