Review

Post-period pains

REINTERPRETING MENOPAUSE: Cultural and Philososphical Issues
Komesaroff P, Rothfield P, Daly J (eds)
Routledge, 1997, £13.99

I was expecting this book to be challenging and thought provoking, and, of course, to include the obligatory references to Merleau-Ponty and embodiment without which any feminist philosophical text is incomplete these days. Unfortunately, however, I was provoked into saying ‘Listen to this!’ to my various friends, not because of some startling new analysis or shocking fact (and there are plenty of those associated with the menopause), but because of the sheer incomprehensibility of most of the text.

For example, Paul Komesaroff uses the following quotation to illustrate a point about identity:

‘Identity is a critical projection of what is demanded and/or sought upon “what is” with an added proviso that it is up to the “what is” to rise, by its own effort, to the “sought/demanded”; or more exactly still, identity is an oblique assertion of the inadequacy or incompleteness of the “what is”.

Without doubt, there are those who would argue that questions of identity are crucial to a cultural interpretation of menopause and so we do need to look at the concept of identity in order to explore such analyses, but surely this can be done in a way that is accessible to a wide range of readers coming from a variety of perspectives? To write in a way that appeals only to an academic elite simply provokes an anti-intellectual response that disregards the actual message, as I know from the comments of my unwilling audiences.

Despite this, a number of the contributors to this book seem to fall over themselves in their enthusiasm to meet the current trends in epistemology.

Mia Campioni succeeds beyond all others, asserting, for example, that the way in which culture reads the occurrence of menopause ‘in women’s bodies/minds appears thus to lead us right back to this problematic foundation in the body/sex of the (M)Other/Woman’. Personally I find that by the time I have disentangled the meaning from this kind of writing (and it gets worse) I have run out of interest in the point being made.

Fortunately, at the end of the book there are a couple of chapters that are both interesting and well presented. Emily Martin’s ‘The woman in the menopausal body’ has strong echoes of her earlier work about the metaphors we use to conceptualise our bodies. She does not particularly say anything new here, but again highlights the tendency within medicine to confront us with consistently negative images involving ‘ceasing’, ‘dying’, ‘losing’, and ‘denuding’ and goes on to suggest her own ‘thought experiment’ as a counterbalance.

Kwok Wei Leng is more concerned by the stance taken by feminists and is critical of what she perceives has been feminism’s outright rejection of medicine’s intervention in the menopause, preferring instead a ‘natural’ approach. The debate between natural and cultural, she says, is a false debate because ‘nature’ is as constructed as anything else. Left to themselves, our bodies would not return to some undiscovered, natural self but would remain the product of this time and this place.

We should not, therefore, reject medical intervention in the menopause on the grounds that it is not ‘natural’, but might reject it if we feel it leads to a closed definition of how women should be. She borrows the concept of the ‘cyborg’ from other writers to develop this thinking and this I did find thought-provoking.

I can only assume that this chapter was placed at the end of the book as a reward for struggling through the rest!