“How did I cope with that for so long every day, all day?1” Disruption, misrecognition, and menopause at work

Abstract

This paper uses Leder’s work on dys-appearance to explore qualitative data from interviews with 50 menopausal cis women working in the UK and the Netherlands. We focus on the viscerality of menopausal experiences, how these disrupt women’s working lives and how they respond accordingly. We propose a threefold framework of misrecognition on this basis, inspired by Leder. We suggest our respondents misrecognize their working menopausal bodies because they appear to be malfunctioning, no longer acting as they “should.” The second modality of misrecognition is of themselves, because they cannot work as hard or as fast as their erstwhile selves. The third modality indexes these women’s fear of social misrecognition by colleagues and being labeled as dilatory or under-performing due to their symptoms. We understand the additional work our participants take on to manage their symptoms for and at work as an example of what Leder calls corporeal hermeneutics. But we also expand on his argument, for instance by proposing that these hermeneutics involve re-recognition that the respondents now have different menopausal bodies and are different menopausal selves.