Enunciating menopause narratives through artivism: Feminist cartooning and body maps

This article uses artivist methods such as feminist cartooning and body mapping to examine the diversity of racialised women’s menopause knowledge and experiences in the UK, Sweden and India, noting how these are varied and need to be understood contextually against the larger frame of their life experiences. We take as our starting point the menopause discourse prevalent in mainstream media and workplace initiatives in the UK, noting that it is still largely white and middle-class. To widen and decolonise this anglophone discourse, we employ artivist methods in enunciating the menopause experiences of racialised immigrant women in Sweden and Dalit working-class women in India. In both Sweden and India, we deployed feminist cartooning to produce comic strips in one case and body mapping in the other to elicit marginal women’s experiences to not just broaden the anglophone discourse but also to reimagine menopause. We argue that between them, UK, Sweden and India are representative of the unevenness of menopause discourse and activism. In comparison to the UK, a forerunner, Sweden represents a middle ground where the questions of menopause have begun to emerge in the last decade via the issue of women’s health and sick leave, whereas in India the discourse and menopause policy is yet to concretise. This article is grounded in our involvement in the AHRC-funded research network, MAUSI Net: Menopause Artivism in the UK, Sweden and India, which brings together feminist scholars from these three different country contexts.