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Is Menopause a Social Construct? | |
admin | |
2020-02-26 | |
发布年 | 2020 |
语种 | 英语 |
国家 | 法国 |
领域 | 地球科学 |
正文(英文) |
“Group of women”, a work by the Chinese-American artist Diana Ong (2007).
Far from being a universal experience, menopause may also be a social construct which, by focusing attention on female ageing, could shed light on gender-based social relations in Western society. An interview with the sociologist Cécile Charlap, author of a book on the issue.
We learn from your book, La Fabrique de la Ménopause (“The Menopause Factory”),1 that the term “menopause is rather recent, and that it originates in France. What was the context behind its creation? Until then, the female body was considered a lesser version of its male counterpart but within the same continuum. For example, the term “climacteric”, inherited from antiquity, was used to qualify this critical turning point in human ageing, thus not at all specific to women nor focused on the end of menstruation and fertility. This new construct of female biology continued throughout the 19th century. With the rise of psychiatry, and in the context of Charcot’s “Theatre of Hysteria”, menopause was even thought to be a cause of mental illness and kleptomaniac or sexual frenzy.
“A clinical lesson at La Salpêtrière” (1887) by André Brouillet (1857-1914). The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is depicted in front of his students with a female patient being treated for hysteria, who has fainted. In the 19th century, medicine considered menopause a dangerous condition that could induce mental disorders.
It is also a Western concept. You explain that in the Japanese tradition, for example, there is no word for menopause… The concept of menopause was founded on the notion of pathology, featuring in medical literature that set forth a rhetoric of decline. But in your view, symptom, deficiency and risk are like the “Three Fates”… The second factor is deficiency, the notion that menopause is not a hormonal transformation but a loss, defined according to a standard corresponding to women’s hormone levels during the years of fertility, as though the fertile body were the norm. Lastly, the third indicator is risk – of cancer, osteoporosis – and in general an alteration of quality of life, as though this were specific to menopause and not ageing. The notion of menopause has also evolved along with medical progress… Then, at the turn of the 20th century, a hormonal conception of the body gradually took hold. Menopause was then considered a disease resulting from oestrogen deficiency, a notion closely related to the development of synthetic hormones by the pharmaceutical industry, culminating in the 1960s to 1980s. More recently, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been losing momentum on the Western market since two studies3 established a link between this treatment and cancer, but it has been booming in Asia since the 1990s. This pathological approach creates a highly negative image of feminine ageing. What does that say about the representations of women and social relations between the sexes? Our conception of menopause, which reinforces this perception, introduces the idea of an ageing process that starts earlier and is marked by more deficiencies for women than for men. We can see this in the public arena: for example, the French Senate is full of grey-haired men revered for their experience and maturity, while the female body is perceived more in relation to fertility and highly valued looks. Thus, the emphasis on sterility and the alteration of physical appearance gives rise to representations of female ageing which mean that, for women, to age is to lose one’s social value. This is quite obvious on the dating market, where women lose their worth much more quickly than men. This image is also influenced by certain representations of menstrual blood… This medical framework shapes women’s personal experience in what you call a “learning path”. What exactly is that? Yet menopause is only one episode in a socialisation process that begins with puberty. Learning to monitor the body, whether for menstruation or managing contraception as part of a couple, is mostly a woman’s responsibility. It would not occur to any parent to ask their son whether he has sperm, or take him to the doctor’s to talk about it, whereas a woman’s body and genitality are investigated and made part of her medical check-ups from an early age. In the 19th century, the medical literature recommended that menopausal women abstain from sex. Today, women are advised not to become pregnant after the age of 40. In addition to physiological menopause, you talk about “social menopause”. What do you mean by that? Based on the interviews that you have conducted, would you say that the menopause norm is imposed more on women from urban and/or affluent backgrounds? In your book, you often refer to the theatre, the “staging” of menopause, which is the subject of extensive media coverage (health websites, magazines, TV shows, etc.) and commands a large audience. Could you summarise this “play” for us? Act two is a kind of echo chamber for the medical narrative on the symptoms, which are as exaggerated as wide-ranging, from vaginal dryness to itchy skin and hard-to-style hair, in addition to depression and loss of libido. This apocalyptic situation is resolved in the third act by an admonition to regain the upper hand and control over one’s body, through medication, nutritional practices, exercise or sex. This course of action for menopausal women recalls that currently advocated for the elderly, who are exhorted to be dynamic, physically and socially active, etc. You have observed that, outside of the medical domain, the only acceptable way to talk about menopause is either in jest or as an insult… What do you think of the recent emergence of the concept of andropause? Reading Footnotes
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URL | 查看原文 |
来源平台 | Centre national de la recherche scientifique |
文献类型 | 新闻 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/229389 |
专题 | 地球科学 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | admin. Is Menopause a Social Construct?. 2020. |
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