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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.

At this event

Siobhán McIlvanney

Professor of French and Francophone Women's Writing

Event details

Bush House (S) Lecture Theatre 2 (4.04)
Bush House
Strand campus, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG