Jamie White-Farnham

Blending rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, and lived experience, Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures explores the forces that have long framed menopause as a problem to solve, a decline to fear, and a market to exploit. Against this backdrop, the authors craft expansive, agency-affirming futures for living with/and/through menopause. Across six chapters, the authors trace how menopause circulates through medical research, workplace expectations, caregiving pressures, health applications, and popular media. They show how decades of medicalization, beauty culture, and binary thinking through various “menobooms” have constrained what menopause can mean—and what women are allowed to feel, choose, or imagine during this transition. Living Menopause invites scholars and practitioners to join a conversation already underway—one that challenges stigma, expands agency, and opens new futures for how we understand and experience menopause. Ultimately, this book encourages readers to continue to critique and think outside current menopause discourse en route to imagining, constructing, and demanding new stories around the menopause experience.

This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives, overcoming fear, anxiety, and anger to draw upon self-advocacy, research, and crucial decision-making.Combining focus group research, content analysis, autoethnography, and textual inquiry, the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis, sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an existing condition or the progression of a natural process—can cause an individual to be thrust into a discourse community that was not of their own choosing.This study will interest students and scholars of health communication, rhetoric of health and medicine, women’s studies, public health, healthcare policy, philosophy of medicine, medical sociology, and medical humanities.

This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives, overcoming fear, anxiety, and anger to draw upon self-advocacy, research, and crucial decision-making.Combining focus group research, content analysis, autoethnography, and textual inquiry, the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis, sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an existing condition or the progression of a natural process—can cause an individual to be thrust into a discourse community that was not of their own choosing.This study will interest students and scholars of health communication, rhetoric of health and medicine, women’s studies, public health, healthcare policy, philosophy of medicine, medical sociology, and medical humanities.