Conflicting discourses, shifting ideologies: pharmaceutical, `alternative' and feminist emancipatory texts on the menopause

Abstract

This article uses a close pragmatic analysis to examine three discourses of the menopause, each with identifiably different health and lifespan ideologies, each used to further its own set of economic and/or political agendas. We argue that these texts have potentially powerful influential effects on women's interpretations of their own `change of life'. Discourse 1 (the `pharmaceutical' discourse) is represented by pharmaceutical brochures, which construct the menopause as medical `pathology' caused by physiological decrement and generally advocate correcting or suppressing symptoms by `treatment' with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Discourse 2 (the `alternative' therapy discourse) as represented in popular printed media texts, rejects both subjection to medical/pharmaceutical intervention, and many of the claims made for HRT, and recommends that women take personal and active `control' by using `natural' remedies and making lifestyle adjustments. Although in ideological conflict, both these discourses are arguably ageist in their reproduction of negative perceptions of menopause. Discourse 3 (the emancipatory feminist discourse) reconstructs the menopause as a positively significant rite of passage — a time of re-evaluation and new-found freedom. Like Discourse 2, feminist discourse rejects the medicalization of menopause and the claims Discourse 1 makes for HRT. But, in addition, Discourse 3 rejects the dominant medical view of the cultural meaning of menopause, with the end of menstruation entextualized as gain, rather than loss, and redefines female midlife as a time of new freedom, wisdom and personal insight.