Towards a Public Theology of Menopause

Abstract

In this article, I explore the power and purpose of a public theology of menopause. I approach this both by focusing on menopause as a pivotal transition in the lives of women (and others who menstruate), and recognising how profoundly menopause intersects with all our lives, the life of the planet, and the relationships between us all. This is, therefore, a public theology of menopause in the broad sense of a practiced faith that looks both inward and outward, to family, community, friend and stranger, online and offline, and that takes account of forces such as globalisation and capitalism and what this implies for our position and action. As an approach to a public theology of menopause, I propose inter-theological and interdisciplinary connections with peri/menopause and survey a range of areas foundational to the lived experience such as nature and medicine; control and power; disorientation and rage; and the centrality of culture, community and ritual. I draw on global sources and an awareness of our embeddedness in a globalised, capitalist world in ecological crisis to support a public-facing theology of menopause characterised by a concern for dignity, connection and justice.

1. Introduction

In this article, I explore the power and purpose of a public theology of menopause. I approach this both by focusing on menopause as a pivotal transition in the lives of close to half the humans on the planet, and, with Mattern, recognising “how deeply menopause is implicated in the human condition”, intersecting with “deeper questions about nature of humanity, the trajectory of our history, the structure of our society” and the relationships between us all (Mattern 2019, p. 8). This is, therefore, a public theology of menopause in the broad sense of a practiced faith that looks both inward and outward, to family, community, friend and stranger, online and offline, and that takes account of forces such as globalisation and capitalism and what this implies for our position and action. I engage with inter-theological and interdisciplinary connections between the peri/menopausal experience and areas such as nature and medicine; control and power; disorientation and rage; and the centrality of culture, community and ritual. I draw on global sources and an awareness of our embeddedness in a globalised, capitalist world in ecological crisis to support a public-facing theology of menopause characterised by a concern for dignity, connection and justice.

For a public theology, we seek transformation for the common good, a shift in the social and theological imaginary to “try to think otherwise in a way that disrupts the cultural symbolic” where necessary, “and enables divine becoming” (Jantzen 1998, p. 59). I will explore here how we might facilitate this otherwise thinking as we make practical theological meaning in menopause, and in faith communities that often pay no heed to the transition. In other words, this is a public theology that is “living in the world as it is, but is called to imagine the world to be otherwise” (Claassens 2019, p. 188), “a two worlds practice” (Rambo 2016, p. 3). In this, I follow Kwok Pui-lan in determining the “critical norm” to be that it move us towards a “concrete Christian praxis of solidarity and liberation” (P. Kwok 2019, p. 203). Here, that praxis is pursued in part through an attentiveness to contextual global issues, a concern both to seek affinity and respect difference, and a recognition of the importance of community for those going through menopause in and with which to share contextual concerns, information and stories. This desire for a theological practice that works has much precedent in theologies centred on justice. Coleman, for example, argues that we should seek what “brings health and wholeness to communities…Our measuring stick should be the ability to assist in the work of ‘making a way out of no way’” (Coleman 2008, p. 106). I recognise here that for many this learning is a matter of survival. While not all those who experience perimenopause and menopause are otherwise marginalised, the transition itself is often marginalised in a variety of ways, as I show below, so the discussion is also an example of how listening to hitherto unheard or indeed actively hidden voices and their theologies might help the Church and the world. Attentiveness to our global setting is reflected through referencing and integrating research and theological insight from the UK, North America, Africa, Asia and Latin America. While the general affinities I highlight here are intended as a helpful move towards solidarity, I also recognise the subjectivity of my UK context and thus look forward to the emergence of more contextualised theologies of peri/menopause.

The theological directions proposed here can be characterised as feminist in several ways, the first being this concern for liberating justice around the disparities and suffering faced by women (including around education, poverty and healthcare), and the flourishing of all (see, for example, McClintock Fulkerson and Briggs 2012, p. 7, and Jones 2012, pp. 24–26). These directions also represent an inclusive feminist theology by centring the varied and contextual biologically female experiences of peri/menopause and drawing attention to their marginalisation. One element of this marginalisation, I would suggest, is neglect in the theological literature: while menopause is felt by almost all (cisgender) women, either after surgery or through reaching middle age, as well as some non-binary and intersex people, transgender men and others, there is proportionately very little theological literature that discusses it directly, as I explore further below. In this article, I also propose taking both a critical and constructive stance, another characteristic of feminist theology. I seek to support “engaging critically with the dissonance between theology and lived reality” as well as the dissonance between wider cultural and political narratives and power dynamics that impact those in peri/menopause (O’Donnell and Cross 2025, p. xxii). Thus, I suggest it must be, in agreement with Briggs, a theology that “address[es] the materiality of human existence and the material conditions in which our imaginations are shaped” (McClintock Fulkerson and Briggs 2012, p. 12). I also engage constructively with theology through the lens of menopause, suggesting ways forward in thinking about the intersection of the two in lived experience.

2. Context and Approaches

In its narrowest sense, to be in menopause is to have stopped menstruating. It usually occurs in middle age (roughly mid-forties to mid-fifties). One is generally taken to have moved into menopause (from perimenopause) when one has had no menstruation for a year. Perimenopause designates the years prior to moving into menopause (typically four to eight years) and I use peri/menopause to refer to perimenopause and menopause together, where appropriate. Menopause can also occur earlier due to certain medical issues and surgeries. It may also be experienced by some non-binary, intersex and transgender people, and thus in this article I will sometimes refer to ‘women’ and sometimes to ‘people’, as appropriate. Research into the particular experiences of these latter groups is very limited, though growing (Sobel et al. 2024). Beyond this bare description, we find a huge variety in the physical, mental and spiritual manifestations of this transition, the age at which it occurs and the duration of perimenopause. Thus, one challenge of perimenopause is that we do not always know if we are in it.

Furthermore, we experience peri/menopause in a context of global crisis on several fronts, with contested roles for technology and indeed humanity, conflicting understandings of nature, artifice, biology and spirituality, and amidst deep, embodied inequality and a climate in turmoil. For those in peri/menopause, these issues are woven into daily experience. The experience cuts across cultural identities and notions of privilege in unique ways, providing opportunities for new affinities and configurations of community as well as highlighting inequities relating to healthcare, poverty and status. In the West, while urged by society to please keep it invisible (private) on the one hand, it takes place in a (public) cultural context filled with various narratives, metaphors and influences. The Church’s influence and support are notable by their absence, a reflection of historical theological associations. Studies of medieval women’s lives in menopause, for example, highlight the complicated religious associations between purity, pollution, menstrual blood, fertility and healing that, at various times, marginalised and excluded both menstruating and so-called post-reproductive women and continue to echo for those both lay and ordained (see McAvoy 2015; Kalas and Magnani 2025; Jagger 2023). I explore its context in other cultures later in this section.

Menopause as a medical condition is relatively recent. Downham-Moore notes in her detailed study that the medicalisation of menopause developed in France in the late eighteenth century, intertwined with developing notions of hygiene, a desire to push back against (often female) folk healers, and the economic advantages of having women reliant on the medical profession for this newly pathologised condition. She notes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, developments in hormone research and replacement (HRT) and gynaecological surgery in North America shifted the geographic focus (Downham Moore 2022, p. 416), but with medical doctors largely (though not exclusively) retaining the notion of menopause as a disease of deficiency and/or a syndrome of loss (see also Sengoopta 2006, p. 167). This medicalisation leads to the language of the ‘treatment’ of ‘symptoms’, sometimes through hormone replacement therapy, and is, as Joyce and Mamo argue, related to a wider medicalisation (and thus pathologisation) of ageing (Joyce and Mamo 2006, p. 102). (It is echoed by a similar turn in relation to pregnancy (e.g., by Smajdor and Räsänen (2024)). Kirchengast also points out that the medical model emerged from a Western research base, and “the idea of a homogeneous society, which…no longer exists” (Kirchengast 2024, p. 2). Thus, she writes, “[a]n ever-growing group of women, such as immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, do not fall into the target group” (Kirchengast 2024, p. 2) and are thereby marginalised and excluded.

Moving to the present day, we find a recent “menopausal turn” in the West (Jermyn 2023, p. 1). This heightened cultural attention to menopause in the UK and elsewhere, elicited by celebrity memoirs, television documentaries and social media content, is often framed as empowering women by “rupturing the silence” around menopause (Jermyn 2024, p. 5), challenging the stigma and taboo that serves to marginalise those going through menopause by making it difficult to find support. The medical model of menopause is currently the dominant narrative in the public sphere in the West as part of this ‘turn’, colonising the experience to the degree that it is often presented simply as scientific truth. Key community and media figures such as Karen Arthur (2023), Tania Glyde (2024) and Davina McCall (2022) in the UK, and Omisade Burney-Scott (2024), Halle Berry and Drew Barrymore in the USA are raising the profile of the experience from different perspectives online and in the media. Social media is full of advice and lists of ‘symptoms’, and a marketplace for products and programmes for sale to alleviate them. In many of these sources, we find what Steinke calls in her memoir a “come-to-Jesus moment of H[R]T acceptance” (Steinke 2019, p. 64).

And so we must also consider the influence of global capitalism on the medicalisation of peri/menopause. Downham Moore’s (2022) history shows how medical interest was impacted by economic considerations: “The longevity advantage of women was…so great that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the adult female population outnumbered men by two to one…[this] made older women the most important demographic for doctors’ economic need for patients” (Downham Moore 2022, p. 8). In relation to ageing in general, Joyce and Mamo note that “[w]hat was once healthy is today presymptomatic, at risk, and in need of antiaging therapies…The expansion of disease categories…is part of a corporate-profit system that fuels and financially benefits from the ever-expanding notion of illness (into wellness)” (Joyce and Mamo 2006, p. 104). Likewise, Rogers asks if the push towards HRT is “a demand for more control over the lives of women, or a revenue-raising venture on the part of pharmaceutical companies” (Rogers 1997, p. 225; see also Anderson 2024).

Thus, a neoliberal, capitalist system encourages us to manage and control ourselves and our bodies, and to be autonomous and productive. We are encouraged to do what we can to enable our continued participation in the workforce, a goal Orgad and Rottenberg critique as “an unquestioned good” (Orgad and Rottenberg 2024, p. 354). Those of us going through menopause in the urban West are, Blackie argues, “living in a culture that doesn’t allow us to build time into our lives for key transitions” (Blackie 2022, p. 23). With little choice but to live in and be driven by these systems, we do not allow for variations in the weather, seasons and natural light, let alone for these key moments, and so we “try to carry on exactly as we were before” (Blackie 2022, p. 23). Thus, another place where women experience marginalisation in menopause is the workplace (including the church) where women’s bodies are not considered as the norm and are often treated, particularly when menstruating or in menopause, as abject or “dirty” (Whiley et al. 2023, p. 897). Women must often navigate asking for ‘accommodations’ through a menopause policy (if there is one) alongside the risk of appearing weak or unprofessional, or even losing one’s job (Safwan et al. 2024). Such a continuation of one’s career or vocation in an acceptable manner is often only possible with medical help such as HRT.

In addition to the medical metaphor, other narratives are available. Some feminist writers (of various ‘waves’) emphasise menopause as a transformative life transition (e.g., Taylor and Sumrall 1991; Greer [1991] 2019; Steinke 2019; Blackie 2022). The medical ‘disease’ model and a developmental narrative describing a new phase of life could lead to quite different theological meaning-making and these positions can often appear in the media as defensive and entrenched. Mattern explores menopause through an evolutionary biology lens, arguing that while “one of science’s profound puzzles” (as it surely also is to those living it), its rarity among other animals suggests that it is, rather than a mistake or “artefact of modern life”, instead “probably adaptive”; in other words, post-reproductive women serve(d) a purpose directly related to humanity’s success, Mattern’s take on the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ (Mattern 2019, pp. 17, 39). She suggests that it may be better described as a cultural syndrome (Mattern 2019, p. 351). As she notes, and crucial for our exploration of meaning making, seeing menopause as adaptive and cultural implies that, very far from being a disease, it is in this view “a normal, even healthy development that calls for little, if any, intervention” (Mattern 2019, p. 39).

Support for a cultural syndrome lens comes from evidence for differences in both peri/menopausal biological changes and attitudes among those socialised as different races and ethnicities within the UK (Prasad 2023), and across global cultures (e.g., Malleret et al. 2024; Berger 1999; Freeman and Sherif 2007; Makara-Studzińśka et al. 2014; Loh et al. 2005). In other words, the way the peri/menopausal transition is experienced in the body seems to be impacted by the stories we tell ourselves about it. The unquestioned use of the medical model in research thus reflects a Western-centred bias that is cultural as well as medical since not only is peri/menopause experienced differently in different cultures, but also “not all cultures believe in or experience, a menopausal syndrome” (Mattern 2019, p. 363; see also Williams 2024). Hallad and Khan, for example, observe that the only sign that women in a rural Indian village in Krishnapur associate with menopause is irregular menstruation (Hallad and Khan 2010, p. 268). Furthermore, they attempt to hide irregular menstruation that could be a sign of perimenopause, just as one might in the Western workplace (Whiley et al. 2023), but for different cultural reasons: in this case because “the attainment of menopause without drastic change is valued highly…severe bleeding or long term irregular menstruation [is linked] to their earlier fate (karma)” (Hallad and Khan 2010, p. 196). Reflecting the impact of globalisation, Hallad and Khan observe that younger women, more exposed to the media, are seeking medical attention for menopause, causing older women to see them as “delicate (najuk/sookshma)” (Hallad and Khan 2010, p. 270). In addition, further research is needed around the experiences of migrants bringing one understanding of menopause into another context and facing distinctive systemic disadvantages (Kirchengast 2024). This reminds us of the significance of the interwoven global context for a public theology, “the importance of thinking transnationally across borders and contexts” and of hearing hidden voices (Hatzaw and Fubara-Manuel 2023, p. 5). We find both significant differences and unexpected affinities that need to be acknowledged in a public theology, avoiding normative or universalising descriptive and theological claims.

Menopause can thus be both an experience of and metaphor for holding seemingly contradictory truths from different models and cultures, truths that carry meaning in different ways, as we explore further in the next section. The way of holding is itself culturally influenced: we might consider here Kwok Pui-lan’s description of Asian Christianity, in its context of a plurality of religions: “religious identities are less clearly defined and tightly bound than in the West [and] there has been much fluid adaptation and interplay among the traditions…Asian feminist theologians often find themselves embodying several religious traditions at once as they claim multiple spiritual roots…[This] allows room for cultural hybridity and cross-fertilization” (P. Kwok 2019, pp. 200–1; see also Yugar 2017 for a Latin American parallel). There is room for more contextually attentive research exploring menopause as an experience of hybridity (Joh 2006, pp. 53–54) and complex theological cross-fertilisation.

Furthermore, the nature of ‘nature’ is contested in the menopause literature, yet this term is often not explicitly defined. It is, if you will, the elephant in the womb. For example, Rogers cites a local doctor’s brochure that states, “Your doctor may prescribe hormone replacement therapy to help restore your body’s natural hormone balance” (Rogers 1997, p. 226). More provocatively, in an online post, menopause doctor Naomi Potter suggests that “[m]enopause is a natural process, but so is diabetes [and] cancer” (Potter 2024). Kwok Wei Leng points out that appeals to unadulterated nature by some feminist writers on menopause resistant to the perceived artifice of HRT draw on problematic foundationalist claims of their own: “this menopausal body, a body uncontaminated by patriarchal intervention, is no less constructed than the biomedical definition of menopause as deficiency or syndrome. Nature, and the normal body, are quite simply not to be trusted as foundations for anything” (W. L. Kwok 1997, p. 265). Furthermore, our bodies speak not only of our own history but those of our ancestors, characterised as they are by our ancestors’ beliefs that guided our upbringing, their genetically held health histories, and the sociocultural contexts in which they lived. These form and re-form a “labyrinth of incarnations” in which our peri/menopause experience is lived (Rivera 2015, p. 156).

Posthumanist Donna Haraway’s (2004) image of the cyborg, a figure that blends and blurs the distinction between humanity and technology, offers one place to explore our relationship to the ‘technology’ of HRT, its impact on the boundaries of our bodies, and our sense of those boundaries. Older people are navigating the use of medical technology “disproportionately” in and with their bodies in unique ways that are often not considered due to ageism (Joyce and Mamo 2006). The extent to which women perceive taking HRT as artificial, or even technological, and their relation to that perception, is under-explored. This cyborg lens on peri/menopause is developed by Wei Leng Kwok (1997) from a cultural and philosophical perspective. Thweatt-Bates (2016) and Midson (2018) explore a cyborg theology, ripe for application to the peri/menopause experience. Thweatt-Bates, for example, proposes that “what it means to be human is…to willingly locate oneself in the interstitial, transversal, out-of-bounds spaces (Thweatt-Bates 2016, p. 12), an excellent description of the space of peri/menopause, but to what extent do we willingly locate ourselves there? And Midson writes of our “dreams of [returning to] Eden”, which resonates with the push and pull of the menopausal transition (Midson 2018, p. 3). Further collaborative research in this domain would be fruitful.

The sense of living in an interstitial space and navigating imposed boundaries is related to the continuing perception of peri/menopause as taboo, a ‘hidden’ experience in the margins, at the boundary. We find in research literature and in considering our own experience that those living through it may thus feel pressured to keep it hidden and under control: as Rogers observes,

[t]hese changes within the body, the fabric of the woman, are experienced by her but remain invisible to the world at large. How can she reestablish control, bring her chaotic being back into some semblance of order? These events must take place at the periphery of her being…To deny and repress may be the obvious solution, maintaining her clean and proper demeanor at the cost of denying the transitions that are taking place.

(Rogers 1997, p. 233)

The unpredictability of the experience and necessity of keeping the experience hidden while carrying on with our lives as if nothing is happening is taxing. In the midst of peri/menopause, it can feel impossible to drag ourselves to church feeling like Monstro ElisaSue in the film Substance (Fargeat 2024), not to mention into the pulpit (see Jagger 2023). As Manfredi writes, “our bleeding bodies are still a deeply unpleasant taboo that lots of people would rather not discuss openly. To confront extremely heavy bleeding and all its unpleasant side-effects, in a church no less, is still a hugely transgressive act” (Manfredi 2024, p. 19).

In addition to the cyborg image, posthumanism offers the image of the monster which shares resonance with the peri/menopausal experience in identifying and transgressing borders and margins: “Monsters serve both to mark the fault-lines”, Graham writes, “but also, subversively, to signal the fragility of such boundaries. They are truly ‘monstrous’—as in things shown and displayed—in their simultaneous demonstration and destabilisation of the demarcations by which cultures have separated nature from artifice, human from non-human, normal from pathological” (Graham 2002, p. 12). Posthumanist feminists such as Shildrick (1997, 2002) and process theologian Keller (2003) engage positively with the chaos and undecidability of the image, offering a sense of “energy and hospitality” (Pavey 2022, p. 8).

Menopause is, therefore, a reminder of limit, ambiguity and mortality, and of the fact that bodies sometimes leak uncontrollably beyond their physical and culturally assigned boundaries. We find suggestive correlations here with Kristeva’s concept of abjection in relation to the suppression of women’s bodies, especially, she argues, the maternal body, which leads to the expectation to “bear no trace of [our] debt to nature” (Kristeva 1982, p. 102). This model can thus be extended to refer to the messy menopausal body and the felt need to hide the transition. Rogers, for example, explores this relationship between pollution and power, arguing that in a medical model, “[m]enopause is no longer an inevitable and normal part of a woman’s life, but the onset of a lifelong deficiency state requiring constant treatment…Is it possible to understand the medical response to menopause as a pollution ritual aimed at warding off the power of postmenopausal women?…Post menopausal women are potentially a powerful force” (Rogers 1997, p. 235). This may be a self-fulfilling prophecy: we might consider that it could be because the experience of peri/menopause is seen as abject, taboo and monstrous that it offers subversive power, and even freedom, to those who have come through it, who are therefore dangerous. Again, we must think intersectionally: for those whose bodies may already be seen as abject, menopause can on the one hand add another layer of challenge, but on the other may be helped by the hard-won skills and coping mechanisms already in place.

While there is a lot of literature, both popular and academic, on menopause, there is vanishingly little theology directly related to menopause, though this is slowly changing (Pavey 2022; Manfredi 2024; O’Donnell 2023; Bridges Johns 2020). Even most feminist theology handbooks offer only a passing mention in a list of women’s bodily life transitions (e.g., McClintock Fulkerson and Briggs 2012; Parsons 2002; Handasyde et al. 2024). This is an astonishing gap given the fact that menopause is a fundamental transition for the many who experience it. As Pavey (2022) notes, it has great “creative potential”, citing Althaus-Reid’s observation that it presents a “plateau for a theological dialogue…[as] a major destabilizer on issues of identity and perceptions of the sacred” (Althaus-Reid 2008, p. 112).

One might expect the experience of peri/menopause to feature prominently in ecofeminism and ecotheology, given the engagement with integrating the ‘artifice’ of HRT and the debate around ideas of ‘nature’. However, there is currently very little explicit consideration of menopause in ecocritical feminism (as noted by Anae (2024, pp. 2–3), whose edited volume offers a welcome exception), ecotheology or theological debates around transhumanism and posthumanism. Interestingly, we do find spiritual and theological resonances in feminist writing about peri/menopause. Steinke, for example, makes frequent biblical and theological references. She writes about the ‘halo effect’, where an infrared camera in a chapel captures how a hot flush spreads throughout a group of nuns in a scene that she notes is reminiscent of Pentecost. And she observes,

Charles Finney, leader of the First Great Awakening, detailed his religious conversion in language similar to how I and other women describe a flash [hot flush]. In his memoir, he says that his heart seemed to be liquid fire: ‘My feelings seemed to rise and flow out-like a wave of electricity’.

(Steinke 2019, p. 11)

Steinke notes that she feels the hot flushes “as wicked as easily as divine” but that during them “I reside in the liminal; I feel that the membrane between me and another world is worn thin” (Steinke 2019, pp. 11–12). As Manfredi adds, being “on fire for God is a sign of spiritual health and renewal (Manfredi 2024, p. 59). As an experience defined by its physical manifestations and conducive to imagination, menopause highlights the interwoven connection between the ‘matter’ of the body/mind and the meanings we make: these are “inextricably fused together” (Barad 2013, p. 23; see Pavey 2022, pp. 4–5). The body is infused by spirit; it is “the very site of transcendence” (Jantzen 1998, p. 252). When it comes to both menopause and theology rooted in this spiritual body, sense-making is balanced with imaginative poetics and an acceptance of mystery (Pavey 2022).

In considering peri/menopause as a liminal space, a transition, we might turn to O’Donnell’s description of Nicola Slee’s “feminist hermaneutic that is attuned to silences, absences, and gaps within the material available to us” (Walton 2023, p. 126). As O’Donnell notes, this approach offers a “fertile space … for feminist theological work” (p. 126). While referring in its context to the interpretation of written texts, we might consider this approach when the material available to us is our own bodies and the experiences of those bodies. What are the silences, absences and gaps in the peri/menopausal experience of our own body and where are the silences, absences and gaps when we think of accounts of this transition in the literature, theology and public discourse?

The meaning we source from our unique embodied experience feeds into our theology, not as an unmediated source of subjective meaning, but nonetheless as integral to the process. It is a reminder of our body and our dynamic connectedness to the flesh of the world and its pain and wounds. I would agree with Melanie May that demanding the inclusion of our body’s “theological testament” within public theology is “an act of resistance against the terror and tyranny…that chokes our voices and cuts us off from what our bodies know…disregard[ing] the boundaries that have defined academic disciplines and Christianity and churches” (M. A. May 1995, p. 25).

Since there is, currently, very little theological framing of menopause, there is an opportunity to develop one’s own. As Jones argues more generally, and I will develop here specifically, when embodied experiences (such as menopause) intersect with theology, there are “[n]ew possibilities for imagining God and ourselves…and…a wealth of new questions” (Jones 2012, p. 32). It is important in crafting new public theology to critically assess how we engage with theological resonance that emerges from different contexts without co-opting or appropriating. Theologians, for example, with liberation, queer, feminist, womanist, process, migrant, disability and postcolonial perspectives, especially as they experience peri/menopause, all make resonant intersectional conversation partners, as we will see, and it is crucial for it to be a respectful conversation seeking a “conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship” (Haraway 2004, p. 15), seeking embodied theological meaning that enhances relationships with God and works for the common good.

3. Elements of a Public Theology of Peri/Menopause

In this section, I explore a wide range of ways that the lived experience of peri/menopause intersects with theological beliefs and practices. Each of the elements in this survey warrants further development but is offered to provoke further consideration that enriches a public theology of peri/menopause.

Feminist theology often uses the metaphor of circles, seasons, or repeated patterns that connect with nature (Slee 2020, p. 72). However, while inextricably “threaded through” (Barad 2013, p. 18) with the past and the future, the move to menopause is also a linear move into a new state, the end of the cycle of menstruation. This is one way that peri/menopausal experiences place us in a liminal betweenness where the metaphors we lived by are challenged, a time of intense disorientation as familiar ways change, often exacerbated by ‘brain fog’; Steinke describes a “feeling of uncontainment” (Steinke 2019, p. 101). There is “a crisis in the ordering of life” that can have profound implications for our theology since, as Brueggemann notes, “[w]hat one says in conversation with God is deeply shaped by one’s circumstance of orientation and disorientation” (Brueggemann 2002, pp. 58, 70). Slee offers metaphors and practices for “multiple overwhelmings” that are helpful, tracing again the metaphor of Pentecost as “the theological epitome of divine overwhelming” (Slee 2020, p. 93). And, of course, for many, the peri/menopause experience may sit within a wider context of familial, societal, cultural or religious disorientation. Here I explore some facets of this disorientation and how we might sit with these feelings and questions.

Part of the disorientation can be strong, unexpected emotions. A friend recently asked, “So when I get this overwhelming rage now, is that my hormones playing up, or is the ‘real me’ coming out?…Or both?” This is a good example of the type of sense-seeking question of peri/menopause, where we try holding seemingly incongruent truths in tension. We may know that it is true that increased anger and rage can be caused by hormonal shifts in oestrogen and serotonin (Manguso 2019) and yet also feel it to be true that the rage is deep self-expression, a ‘re-wilding’ that may have been previously hidden. We find corresponding metaphors in menopause literature around breaking free, bursting out, exploding or “our authentic self trying to claw her way out” (Manfredi 2024, p. 17, see also p. 46), “all set to erupt” (Blackie 2022, p. 14), “releasing a rage that shakes the sky” (Pinkola Estés, quoted in Steinke 2019, p. 112). Both ‘truths’ constitute experience mediated through our imaginaries of context and language.

Perhaps we might discover that these readings are only incongruent because of our different ways of making meaning, which are actually felt as a coherent whole: “what if that anger isn’t separable from physiology?” asks Manguso; “[w]hat if, as menopausal women discover more forcefully than the rest of us, the duality of body and mind is simply irrelevant?” (Manguso 2019). As noted earlier, we can often hold different meaning-making strategies—scientific, mythical, theological—together without conflict because they do different work for us. Steinke illustrates this capacity in her description of a hot flush: “my brain does not get the estrogen it longs for and so, in sorrow and revolt, sends heat speeding along my nerves. I imagine the Pentecostal flame wavering just above my head” (Steinke 2019, p. 54).

On the other hand, the metaphors we find here do reinforce the sense of a duality. Steinke asks, “what of my feelings—embodied for the first time in a [hot flush]—that I am divided, split into soul and body, that there is a me, lonely and frantic, who wants out of my corporeal form?” (Steinke 2019, p. 11). She asks, “I’d run away, but how does one flee one’s own body?” (Steinke 2019, p. 4). The unpredictability of the body in peri/menopause can reinforce this sense of duality: “[h]er body, she says, is like a stranger to her now; it seems external, separate, a nuisance. Once she took it for granted; now she talks to it and asks it questions” (Komesaroff 1997, p. 63); “Rita was starting to feel like she was living in someone else’s body, alienated from herself” (Steinke 2019, p. 56). Are we simply making our own body abject, externalising it by addressing it, seeking impossible escape? Wonhee Anne Joh’s theology of the cross is helpful here, drawing on the Korean concept of jeong (Joh 2006). Oh (2017) describes how through Joh’s lens of an “ethic of vulnerability”, the cross discloses both the horror of abjection (han) and also the power of love (jeong), suggesting a theological lens and conversation for future development around compassionate reconciliation for our embodied selves and creation (p. 212).

Cultural and indeed theological beliefs around the believability and authority of women’s voices and women’s anger in church and in society will also impact the parts of ourselves—especially women’s rage—that might have previously been hidden, and the intersectional reasons why (Jermyn 2024, p. 12). Manguso points out that women’s anger is often more acceptable when it is about something (Manguso 2019). At this time of liminality, when we start to ‘crack’, such wounds as those “caused by racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia…if left unattended, may fester and return with a vengeance” (Claassens 2019, p. 186). Menopause can be the heat that draws out rage caused by injustice, aligning with God’s anger, and fanning the flames of a political, activist theology, such as that of Slee’s “feisty, radical, Catholic crones” and their global sisters, “using every bit of their remaining energy working for radical change” (Slee 2020, p. 255; see also Dalton and Simmons 2010, p. 112).

Furthermore, the questioning around one’s shifting identity and role, especially in relation to the wider public, is likely, I would suggest, to be experienced in varying ways. It may well be a feature of whiteness that a straight, middle-class woman who is white (or socialised as white) may, until peri/menopause, have rarely needed or chosen to examine her identity in this way. As Kang notes, “[t]hose who are in the center do not ask the ‘who-am-I’ question because they are normative. Their identity is self-evident and, therefore, there is no need for further explanation” (Kang 2012, pp. 109–10). It is only when she is suddenly outside the centre that this unfamiliar questioning arises, while others may feel bound to undertake such questioning on a daily basis. Further research to explore affinities and differences in this area would be helpful. This experience of identity crisis in peri/menopause could present an opportunity for those with privilege, for example those socialised as white, straight and middle-class, to broaden their understandings of identity construction, their complicity in this imbalance and a sense of empathetic affinity and political incentive, so that these peri/menopausal identity questions turn from only existential or spiritual questions into sociocultural and geopolitical ones as well (Kang 2012, p. 110).

Part of the disorientation of peri/menopause stems from the lack of control, agency and choice in what is occurring. We cannot ultimately prevent peri/menopause, any more than we can prevent death. In the public media, we find various tools, programmes and treatments offered to help ‘manage’ peri/menopause, to feel ‘empowered’ and ‘in control’. Do our desires for control and management become more pronounced than learning through trust and mystery? From a de-colonial perspective, Enriquez describes how “[t]he colonized mind attempts to ‘repair’ the future with ‘what works,’ focusing on reliable outcomes and guaranteed answers” (Enriquez 2024, pp. 17–18), leaving little room for the emergence and invitation of the new and unexpected. We might look curiously at our desire to control and dominate our body’s transition and consider the metaphor of the body as home, in Keller’s sense of a place of inhabitation rather than domestication (Keller 2024, p. 4). This is not to deny the usefulness of HRT, but to stimulate consideration of the role it plays and its relationship to ageism, worship of youth and fertility, and how a desire to control and avoid discomfort may “come at the expense of denigrating our older sisters” (Manfredi 2024, p. 6).

Peri/menopause thus also challenges our conceptions of suffering and weakness. Manfredi argues that we should not label those in menopause as “weak and defective”, nor “choose a story of suffering and weakness, hiding away” (Manfredi 2024, p. 65). I would agree that we have agency to frame our own narrative (Manfredi 2024, p. 66). I have also noted, however, how ideas of weakness are culturally and medically framed. Rather than argue that we are not weakened through peri/menopause, we might remember that weakness is not inherently contrary to the power and purpose of the Christian gospel, but is integral to God’s inversion, on the cross, of the definitions and implications of strength, power and weakness. I do not imply acceptance of oppression nor the fetishisation of weakness but that, in peri/menopause, we might pay attention to the sources of our narratives of strength, autonomy and freedom. A justice-serving, climate-conscious, loving strength may come from a kenotic relationship to our own bodies in peri/menopause. We are invited to recognise anew our agency within suffering, our interdependency, our need for communal strength to work for justice, and our dependence on God (see McFague 2017).

Through navigating the ever-changing peri/menopause experience, we gain heightened awareness of the shifting, dynamic, relational nature of human becoming rather than valuing stasis and stability. We need not be petrified. Process theology can be a useful companion here for considering both a theological anthropology of becoming, and a theology of the accompanying nature of God (Pavey 2022). We also find theological resources for considering our interrelational finitude as a blessing of mystery and trust, definitive of our human in(ter)carnation (Rivera 2015). Thus, May writes: “I wrest instead a blessing from my finitude and my own mere mortality. This blessing is the clarity and courage to participate—my body a textured web—in the ongoing process of naming and renaming, of making and remaking, of binding and loosing, trusting the end to God” (M. A. May 1995, p. 104). And Rivera argues,

Unless I can embrace my own flesh, and its beginnings in the flesh of another, I cannot love other fleshly beings—nor can I understand the incarnation. What is at stake for them is nothing less than the possibility of love. In Christian texts, God is the initiator and model for such an embrace of flesh.

(Rivera 2015, p. 154)

Both May and Rivera, in their own ways, imply struggle, pointing to this embrace that is wrested as for the sake of ourselves and the other, exemplified and enabled by Christ, and thus serving a public theology that honours the body in peri/menopause.

We might also critically examine public messaging around freedom and dependency in the light of this textured web and embrace of fleshly life. As Campioni observes, on the one hand, “[t]he new strategy appears to be to stress women’s right to be free from ‘symptoms’ and to have the freedom to choose to control their lives with ‘HRT’ and/or all sorts of ‘cures’” (Campioni 1997, p. 80). And yet, on the other hand, HRT creates a medical dependency. A patient of Komesaroff asks,

Why should I take hormonal therapy, with all its unknown side-effects, including possibly the increased risk of breast cancer, so that I will become dependent on my doctor and the whole medical machine just when I thought I was becoming rid of them, so that my husband will regard me as a ‘triumph of science’—and merely in order to live for a few extra months, alone, when I’m eighty?

(Komesaroff 1997, p. 71)

Downham Moore notes that even at the birth of the medicalisation of menopause in the West, doctors would, on the one hand, insist the process was normal and natural while they “just as commonly, invoked the frightening spectre of uncomfortable illnesses and dangerous diseases that would occur if a woman failed to observe elaborate set of prescriptions and proscriptions with which hygienic advice for them was filled” (Downham Moore 2022, p. 7). We find resonance here with a question that Hatzaw and Fubara-Manuel ask in relation to women in world Christianity navigating identities and their sense of agency, “the provocative question of the line between survival vs. complicity in one’s own oppression” (Hatzaw and Fubara-Manuel 2023, p. 4). Questions of control, agency and freedom around peri/menopause are, again, always situated in intersectional contexts.

For example, in some cultures, post-reproductive women are, in a sense, rewarded and take on roles that involve higher status and by implication increased visibility (Flint 1975), contrary to the common experience of Western women (though more apparent in pre-Industrial Europe; Mulder-Bakker and Nip 2004). Rogers cites several studies where menopause is “eagerly anticipated and free from unpleasant symptoms” (Rogers 1997, p. 231; see also Berger 1999, p. 51). In some cultures, this occurs because the perceived impurity of menstruation is removed in menopause. In the traditional religion of the Xhosa of South Africa, for example, menopausal women acquire a degree of purity that allows them to take part in key cultural ceremonies (Bam 1986, p. 40), while Hallad and Khan describe new roles available to menopausal women in various contexts in India, again due to the ending of menstrual impurity: “women felt they are like men and pure” (Hallad and Khan 2010, pp. 288–89). However, as noted earlier, Kirchengast points out that women with a background in migration who may have come from a wide range of such cultures often do not benefit: “menopause is not the key to more personal freedom and improved social status, it represents an additional stress factor” due to their socio-economic status, language barriers, cultural taboos, and lack of access to support” (Kirchengast 2024, p. 5).

British writer Hilary Mantel describes the women over fifty from her youth as “unyielding, undaunted and savagely unimpressed by anything the world could do to them”, suggesting we could “revive their dauntless spirit, instead of dwindling, apologising and shrinking from the camera lens” (Mantel 2009). But perhaps, as suggested previously, it is only because the world pays no attention that these women become undaunted and savagely unimpressed by the world, turning disregard into a shared alchemical power and sense of self-worth. There is room here through peri/menopause to question our understandings of visibility from a theological perspective. In an age of social media, we often measure visibility quantitatively rather than quantitatively. Those who have been silenced need the option to be heard. But might there also be an option for a theology of retreat and invisibility where appropriate, of “wintering” (K. May 2020), where privacy is power and we need the nourishment of darkness?

From a different, and likely relatively advantaged place, Manfredi (2024) and Ruefle (2015) find the new invisibility in their UK and US contexts freeing, “the most wondrous gift” (Ruefle 2015) and an invitation to “find new ways of seeing our bodies as worthy and inherently wonderful” beyond the youthful beauty standards of the wider culture (Manfredi 2024, p. 93). By this particular invitation of peri/menopause, we are reminded of our deep dignity: “being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone” (Catechism 1997, 357). We find through this Roman Catholic theology that we are always someone, no matter how much the material of the something changes.

Steinke observes of her changing material, “I may be aging, even decaying a little, but rot, let’s not forget, is generative” (Steinke 2019, p. 217), and “Call it decay or change, I am, like everything else in nature, recyclable” (Steinke 2019, p. 209). An acknowledgment of our interrelated finitude in peri/menopause points us to our relationship to the rest of creation in our material life, decline and death. Manfredi suggests that “[y]ou’re not depleting and decaying like a uranium rod; year by year the strength and core of you fading. The essence of you isn’t diminishing” (Manfredi 2024, p. 9). While I have also stressed the second sentiment, those of us who are middle-aged and older are, quite literally, slowly physically depleting, if not literally decaying quite yet. What is needed is not to deny this but to detach it from the implied sense of the end of one’s usefulness, from shame, fear and even sin. We read in Romans of our “bondage to decay” (Romans 8: 21, NRSV). And yet, we might find ways to also acknowledge our physical interconnectedness with nature, and the way our bodies will one day be ‘re-indigenised’, nourishing the earth in death. Is it possible, through a peri/menopause lens, to unearth a positive theology of decline and even decay, challenging embodied individualism for the common ecological good? How do we acknowledge that we are someone, not something, while also being present to and caring for our bodies (including our minds) in whatever state they are in, and acknowledging our dignity in a holistic way that resists ageist messaging?

Along similar lines, a theology of menopause challenges the worship of youth and fertility in society and the Church in general as short-sighted from an individual and global perspective. It values menopausal women in an honouring rather than patronising manner. Manfredi, for example, argues that the Church is “obsessed with courting and sustaining the attention of youth, because the young are seen as the only viable way for the church to grow and achieve new life” (Manfredi 2024, p. 72), and thus the presence of those who are ‘post-reproductive’ (a term that centres reproduction) can be of little interest, an important challenge to quantitative models of mission. We find here too a challenge in seeking models from scripture when, as Clack notes, so often older female figures become stories of late pregnancy: “It is only in bearing a child”, she argues, “that the worth of a woman is affirmed” (Clack 2024, p. 235). It could be fruitful moving forward to develop the intersection of menopause with the valuing of (in)fertility in theology and faith practice more widely.

There are, as we see, things that must be let go in peri/menopause, including our own youth and fertility. We find messaging in the media, especially around HRT, that promises to enable women to go back to how they were before but I for one consider that I have earned my ‘dauntless spirit’ through struggle and want to honour that: I agree with Walton that “[w]e do not so much need to discover a way to bind things firmly together, but instead to find the words that bless our own undoing” (Walton 2023, p. 70). We cannot ‘go back’ any more than we can appeal to a foundational ‘nature’. And yet, another part of our meaning making in peri/menopause is what we do with our history, our youth, and with what we have inherited. The mid-life shift into menopause is, as we have noted, a liminal space for such reflection, where we allow and “witness all around us cracks, fissures and fertile openings in what we had conceived of as cold, dead and frozen worlds” (Walton 2009, p. 36). Our understanding of our past is based on the stories we tell about it and therefore, the past is not only a resource of memory, but is, in this sense too, open and fertile rather than fixed and dead. The letting go aspect of peri/menopause often needs space and time for lament, especially within faith communities (Devereux 2021, p. 46). As a theological resource for this, Coleman draws on Karen Baker Fletcher’s notion of rememory to argue that “only through consciously remembering the past can we resolve the difficulties and strengths that often lie within the past” (Coleman 2008, p. 104). Coleman describes an enriched view of the past as necessary in discerning what to let go and what to be sure to remember; it is “a dominant force in our becoming” (Coleman 2008, p. 105). She teaches us to shift the shape of our storytelling about the past—together—towards the possibilities of the future. She places this activity in community, through both storytelling and ritual (Coleman 2008, p. 105). This storytelling is crucially of the body as well as about the body: “my body has a history” (M. A. May 1995, p. 102, emphasis in original). We might even say, my body is a history. In this transitional gap, language may fall short since, as Slee observes, “[t]he language and means of expression we formerly called upon to articulate our sense of self and faith appear to have died on us or self-destructed, and we don’t yet have a new language to name things with” (Slee 2020, p. 101).

We turn, somehow, from letting go to the letting come of peri/menopause, from an unmaking to a remaking, as a continual process that is conscious of community. We find here the potential of theological metaphors of salvation and resurrection for considering the transition into a new kind of ongoing, post-reproductive fertility. As Coleman argues (via a discussion of the fiction of Octavia Butler), “[s]alvation is not found in a northern paradise or in achieving the Destiny. Salvation is not the goal; rather, it is the journey itself” (Coleman 2008, p. 145). In considering a public theology of peri/menopause, we might consider how we let this sense of salvation and resurrection be unearthed in a way that serves the health and wholeness of our communities, both local and global. To this end, May centres this resurrection remaking in embodied presence: “I believe the resurrection of the body—which, in turn, transfigures the mind—happens whenever and wherever we participate in a new solidarity with and presence to our own bodies and the bodies of others. Resurrection happens as we are incorporated into the body of the Risen One and as we honor as holy ‘the body of God’, i.e., the earth” (M. A. May 1995, p. 104).

To live in a community-orientated, relational culture while going through menopause is a privilege not readily available in many contexts. This advantage, or its absence, can dramatically influence one’s experience of menopause, and indeed one’s connected faith practice. Practically speaking, it can be hard to develop a ritual for the end of menstruation when menstruation itself is considered abject and taboo (Rogers 1997, p. 233; Hallad and Khan 2010, p. 285). It can also be harder now to learn from older generations when the global landscape is changing so rapidly. Nonetheless, we need to find opportunities to create storytelling spaces of honesty, lament, affinity, difference, and a dauntless Spirit, turning the “culturally invisible, embodied experience into audible words” (Moyo 2017, p. 180). Theopoetic, embodied rituals within safe and brave spaces to mark the menopause transition, whether liturgical or extemporaneous, whether in a church or a wild river, are ways of weaving between realities and truths, and marking thresholds, allowing communal transfiguration (e.g., Manfredi 2024, pp. 100–1; O’Donnell 2023, pp. 136–37, who also cites Heppenstall 2015, pp. 352–59, and Berry 2009). We may also find spiritual accompaniment through imagining God as a menopausal woman, honouring the image of the older woman (or ‘crone’) in theological imagination (Pavey 2022, p. 12; Slee 2020, p. 257), and discovering that our experience provides a crucial lens for our world.

4. Menopause as Analogy: Conversations

In this final short section, I suggest two domains where menopause itself could be developed as just such a resonant metaphor and lens.

Firstly, I consider what the experience of peri/menopause could offer in thinking about the climate crisis. Ecotheological and cyborg theology could dialogue more explicitly with a theology of menopause in a mutually beneficial conversation, merely begun here, to explore the embodied decline, ‘re-wilding’ and renewal experience and the impact and integration of technology. Is the “beloved planet go[ing] through menopause [to take] her place among the wise women planets that dance among the stars” (Gunn Allen 1990, p. 55)? In her account of the culture and science of menopause, Mattern argues that in an over-populated world, “our capacity for non-reproduction is essential to our survival” as a species (Mattern 2019, p. 238). What would it mean for theology to ponder the virtue of non-reproduction (exemplified by post-reproductive women) as a globally contextual response to over-population that is damaging the planet and its climate? This draws our attention to the tension between individualist desires and common goods, to power and control, and to our interrelatedness. It also draws attention to our relationship to decay and death as part of valuing life. As noted earlier, Keller calls us to see home as a place of inhabitation rather than domestication (Keller 2024, p. 4). Honouring and caring for the physicality we inhabit in peri/menopause means attending with love to our own bodies, our communal bodies and earth, and, critically, the bonds between them.

Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, consider this description: battling a narrative of decline imposed by outside forces, negotiating an imprinted history, bearing with rage and anxiety, invited to navigate towards a new, quieter ‘elder’ identity, letting go of power and allowing the rediscovery of a collaborative agency through a dauntless Spirit. All this could describe moving into menopause. Might it also describe the experience of the mainline Protestant Church in the West? In other words, is it an imaginative stretch to suggest that the mainline Protestant Church in the West could be characterised as in menopause? What then could be learned from the women in menopause that occupy so many of its pews? A question for future consideration.

5. Conclusions

I have explored the power and purpose of a public theology of perimenopause and menopause. As noted, this is innovative in topic and method. Through engaging with interdisciplinary and inter-theological sources, I have offered a survey of elements and avenues for a public theology of menopause with the intent to contribute to an ongoing dialogue. There are undoubtedly other connections that could be explored, such as intersections with other female body experiences, and other theologies centred on the body. My intent has not been to present a coherent, cohesive theology for what is, after all, not a coherent, cohesive lived experience, but rather to provoke thought around the intersection of peri/menopause with theology.

As I’ve shown, these experiences require a consideration of limitation, struggle, resilience and relational power grounded in dignity as we do our “work of resurrection” from our own context (Musa Dube 2018, quoted in Claassens 2019, p. 190). For many of us living in advantage, menopause suggests a posture of ‘listening back’ to the world, not to silence ourselves but to draw out fruitful storytelling and to form interrelational bonds of solidarity and liberation. A kenotic, incarnational theology of peri/menopause is, I would therefore argue, one that seeks to learn from and transfigure an inherently disruptive experience into practice that shifts the social and theological imaginary to “promote the survival, health, and wellbeing of the whole community, taking into account how the social, cultural, and psychological dimensions intersect with gender and the politico-economic base” (P. Kwok 2019, p. 193, emphases added). I have sought to take into account the whole community by engaging in this inter-theological, interdisciplinary and global survey, indicating avenues for further potential collaboration. I have highlighted both differences and affinities, and suggested how aspects of the peri/menopause experience can foreground theological belief and practice, in a globalised context, and with justice and intersectionality as central considerations.