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.
Keywords
Introduction
This paper focuses on how the menopause interrupts women’s day-to-day working lives and leads to three modalities of misrecognition. Although menopause as a workplace issue has gained more attention over the past few years, especially in the UK, research remains limited. For example, we have only been able to locate 20 peer-reviewed English language publications in organization studies to date. Taken together, these studies point out: the negative social constructions around menopause and workplace corollaries (e.g. Atkinson et al., 2015, 2021a; Gatrell et al., 2017; Grandey et al., 2020; Rowson et al., 2023; Whiley et al., 2023); that many women struggle with menopausal symptoms at work (e.g. Steffan and Potočnik, 2023); how women are Othered and disadvantaged at work because of this life phase (e.g. Beck et al., 2018, 2020, 2021); and that they do not always have negative experiences at work and exemplify both tenacity and resistance to problematic stereotypes in this context (e.g. Butler, 2020; Jack et al., 2019; Quental et al., 2023; Steffan and Loretto, 2025).
There are also conceptual treatments of the issue which critically synthesize the relevant literatures and outline research agendas accordingly (Atkinson et al., 2021b; Gatrell et al., 2017; Grandey et al., 2020; Ryan and Gatrell, 2024), and two studies Irni (2009) and Bell and Sinclair (2016)—which mention menopause briefly in their discussions of older women at work and women leaders respectively. A larger (albeit still quite small) body of research on menopause as a workplace issue appears in disciplines beyond organization studies, including occupational psychology, obstetrics, public health and nursing.
We expand this body of research by foregrounding the disruptions which the viscerality of menopausal experience can entail at work and how this shapes women’s responses and impacts their sense of self. Our research question therefore asks how menopausal subjectivities are continually reconstructed at work through the unpredictable dys-appearance of cis women’s menopausal bodies. Analyzing menopause as an embodied phenomenon helps us to theorize its materiality in the context of the neoliberal late capitalist workplace. We use Leder’s (1990) concept of dys-appearance of the body to better grasp how menopausal women can be temporarily Othered at work because their symptoms interfere with expectations of productivity in contemporary organizations. Leder theorizes dys-appearance as moments when the body is hailed into our conscious awareness as an object by misfiring or malfunctioning, for example when we are in pain or when menopausal symptoms impede us at work.
We consider this against the backdrop of contemporary neoliberal workplaces in late capitalist society as spaces where the “sequence of socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments is what it means to have a life at all” (Freeman, 2010: 5). With her concept of chrononormativity, Freeman analyzes how the temporalities of non-cis-male embodiment (e.g. those of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause) clash with capitalist production rhythms. She emphasizes that queer bodies in particular are disadvantaged in this regard. Other scholars have built on Freeman’s critique in arguing that capitalist modes of production both support and consolidate this kind of oppression in disciplining workers who cannot adhere to normative work rhythms and linear ideals of career progression over time (e.g. Arruzza, 2022; Kjaer and van Amsterdam, 2020). These workers—including menopausal cis women—therefore need to invest additional effort should they experience any interruptions to the constant and consistent productivity demanded by chrononormativity.
This paper analyzes data from qualitative interviews with 50 menopausal cis women in the Netherlands and the UK to understand the viscerality of menopausal experiences, how they can disrupt women’s working lives and their responses to this disruption. First, we briefly describe the phenomenon of menopause. Second, we discuss the theoretical concepts from Leder’s (1990) work that structure our thinking around disruption and the menopausal body—dys-appearance, affective call, telic demand and corporeal hermeneutics—and discuss why his theorizing is so relevant to our analysis of menopausal embodiment at work. Next we describe our methodology and present our findings. We end by reflecting on how an organizational focus on productivity shapes menopausal women’s subjectivities at work in conjunction with how their bodies are hailed into conscious and discomfiting awareness by the unexpected, unpredictable but also typically short-lived nature of menopausal symptoms.
Menopause
Menopause is the time in a woman’s 2 life when she no longer menstruates and cannot fall pregnant. In clinical terms it takes place 12 months after her last menstrual period and so strictly speaking lasts only for 24 hours. That said, most women experience symptoms in the run up to menopause—that is, during perimenopause—and many have symptoms for several years post-menopause. On average in the global north, white women reach menopause at 51 and the median age for symptom onset is 48 (McKinlay et al., 2008). Elsewhere in the world, the onset of perimenopause and menopause itself tend to happen earlier. For example, 70% of Blümel et al.’s (2012) Latin American respondents reported menopausal symptoms before 45, which would be classified as early menopause in the global north. Similarly, Aldrighi et al. (2005) suggest that Brazilian women will on average reach menopause at 48.
However, every woman’s experience of menopause is in fact specific to her in terms of symptoms onset, age at menopause, and whether and for how long symptoms persist afterward. For example, one in 100 women reach menopause before 40, which is classified in the global north as premature menopause (Coulam et al., 1987). Others go through “cliff edge” menopause, when they reach menopause very suddenly—for example, because of an oophorectomy, when the ovaries are surgically removed. Equally, each woman’s constellation of symptoms is unique (Riach and Jack, 2021). Some experience almost no symptoms at all and “breeze through” this stage in their lives (Steffan and Potočnik, 2023); whereas other evidence suggests as many as 56% have very disruptive symptoms (Bryson et al., 2022). The remainder fall between these two end points on the continuum. Symptoms include erratic and/or heavy menstrual bleeding, sleep disturbances, hot flushes and night sweats, depression and anxiety, vaginal dryness, lower libido, difficulties with recall and concentration, loss of bone density and weight gain (El Khoudary et al., 2019). On average these embodied experiences related to hormonal changes last between 7 and 10 years (Riach and Jack, 2021).
Theoretical framework
To analyze menopausal experiences, we use Leder’s (1990) theory of the lived experience of the body in pain. Leder’s work is not well-traveled in organization studies. Below, we expand on his theorizing of embodiment, followed by a reflection on why we use it for understanding menopausal experiences in organizations.
Leder’s theory of dys-appearance
Leder draws heavily on the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962: 10), starting from the latter’s observation that “one’s own body is the third term, always tacitly understood, in the figure-background structure, and every figure stands out against the double horizon of external and bodily space.” The paradox here is that we cannot experience the world other than through our bodies, and yet, as Leder (1990) puts it, “Wherever I go to gaze upon [my body], it comes with me as itself the source of the gaze” (p. 12). Following from this, he develops his own phenomenological take that, in everyday lived experience in the global north, our material bodies are largely beneath the surface of our awareness: they only command our attention when they malfunction, such as during episodes of pain and/or illness. Leder describes dys-appearance as “those phenomena in which the body manifests itself as a problematic or disharmonious thing, and is therefore experienced as a ‘being away’” (p. 70). He describes what he refers to as the “affective call” of these episodes, which has a “gnawing, distasteful quality” (p. 73).
As Leder intends with the use of the prefix “dys,” these instances of disruption through pain or illness make us long for our younger, fitter bodies, and fear that the distress will persist and indeed worsen. But it is also a play on words: “dys” comes from the Latin “dis” which means to be away, apart or sundered. The body therefore not only dys-appears during these periods of time as misfiring and surging into consciousness but equally in the sense that it is away from its “normal” place—under our control. As Leder suggests then, “The experienced self is rent in two as one’s own corporeality exhibits a foreign will” (p. 87). Our bodies suddenly demand our attention – we cannot ignore them during these episodes (p. 89). Moreover, in Leder’s theorizing, the labor entailed in responding to these disruptions – including, we argue, those created by challenging menopause symptoms at work - can be understood as answering a “telic demand” (p. 77).
For Leder, the telic demand occurs when the body surfaces as a disruptive or problematic entity rendered apart from the self. This means that dys-appearance impels us to normalize the disruptive, rebellious, or unruly body to return it to its state of invisibility. The telic demand is thus a call to action following the call to attention from the dys-appearing body. Leder (1990: 78) adds that When in pain, the body becomes the object of an ongoing interpretive quest. We obsessively probe and palpate even when this increases discomfort. We read books on the body, seeking self-diagnosis, or ask friends for answers. We go back through the past, reflecting on our bodily history and possible origins of the current problem. We pose tests to see what diminishes or increases pain. Even at times when the discomfort disappears we wonder why and hold truthful vigil . . . [As such] we come to see our body in a series of technologically and conceptually extended ways that otherwise would be unavailable.
As such, for Leder, dys-appearance alters our relationship to our bodies, and the process we engage in to address the consequent unpleasantness is what he calls corporeal hermeneutics. Another important part of his argument is that dys-appearance brings us back from being ever future-focused to the present, so that we are temporarily outside of our projects, our goals and the unfolding of time.
But it is not only the misfiring physical body that can place a telic demand on us.
As Leder (1990) posits, there is a sociality to its dys-appearance: My awareness of my body is a profoundly social thing, arising out of the experience of the corporeality of other people and of their gaze directed back at me [. . .] Only because my vision always incorporates that of other people could they have this power of negation over me (pp. 90, 95).
He suggests this occurs when “the gaze of the Other” on our bodies is “highly distanced, antagonistic, or objectifying” (p. 96), leading us to become suddenly and uncomfortably aware of how our corporeality is somehow unsightly, troubling or shameful in someone else’s eyes. In these instances, the “dys” in dys-appearance refers to their gaze being “alien . . . away, apart, asunder, from one’s own” (p. 97). What Leder doesn’t mention is that this is central to the experience of people who live in marginalized bodies, such as people of color, trans folk, disabled and fat people. Since their bodies are the locus of their marginalization, they are continually (made) consciously aware of their bodies (Puwar, 2004).
What Leder does point out is that women’s reproductive lives as well as social pressures around gendered appearance mean they are generally more body-conscious than men. He avers that this is heightened at work, whilst adding that reproductive phenomena like menstruation, pregnancy and menopause are “a normal and necessary part of the life cycle. They are not in themselves dysfunctional or alienating” (p. 89). Although Leder is certainly not a theorist who foregrounds gender in his thinking, this is an important point because he does not in any sense regard these “normal and necessary” reproductive phenomena as ailments, or as “in themselves dysfunctional or alienating.” However, he insists that “normal body functioning” for cis women “involves regular and even extreme bodily shifts” (p. 89). Moreover, Leder suggests that “such states frequently do include moments of discomfort and dysfunction,” citing morning sickness, the bodily bulk of late pregnancy and dysmenorrhea as examples (p. 90).
Next we expand on how Leder’s theorizing contributes to our analysis of the vicissitudes of menopausal embodiment in the workplace.
Dys-appearance and gendered embodiment in organizations
A Scopus search spanning January 2000 to the time of writing produced only two instances of the use of Leder’s work in our discipline, both of which have gender as a central analytical focus. First, Yates et al.’s (2018) research deals with senior female police officers’ experience of work-related stress, which they analyze against the backdrop of a hypermasculine police force culture. They show how their participants “navigated the ‘telic demand’ of stress” (p. 96) by playing down symptoms and working beyond their embodied and psychological limits. Second, O’Neill (2019) shows that women leaders’ bodies often dys-appear in workplaces, because they are constructed as socially problematic in this context. Like Yates et al. (2018), she indexes the labor which her respondents invested to answer the telic demand of gendered constructions of leadership, for example by deliberately choosing clothing which minimizes their physicality.
We see some important connections between Yates et al., O’Neill, and our own argument, specifically around how women’s bodies might dys-appear at work and the ameliorative work which is therefore required to push them back under the organizational surface. Nonetheless, and especially given that Leder is not a scholar whose work is commonly drawn upon in organization studies, there are obvious alternatives for unpacking the potentially disruptive viscerality of menopausal bodies at work. These include Butler’s (2004, 2005) theorizing of our (mis)recognition of each other as (non-)viable subjects. Another example is Freeman (2010) on chrononormativity, as cited earlier. Both sets of ideas are also far more frequently taken up in our discipline, Butler’s in particular.
Although Freeman and Butler offer very important insights into social misrecognition, we think they fall short in analyzing how menopause as a material workplace experience can also threaten our sense of self and our understanding and experience of our bodies, at least temporarily. We detect all three phenomena in our interview data. As such, and in seeking to theorize all of this better, Leder offers a distinctive route that captures the often-challenging viscerality of menopausal embodiment in the workplace via bodily dys-appearance as well as responses to the consequent telic demand via corporeal hermeneutics. His work represents a framework to grasp the lived materiality of menopause at work coupled with an explanation of why this experience can be so troublesome, and the corollary responses. In short, the way that we read Leder is as an analyst of various forms of misrecognition as triggered by bodily dys-appearance.
What interests us here is therefore how visceral menopausal experiences interrupt the flow of women’s day-to-day working lives; how this can affect their sense of self, their relationships to their bodies and their relationships to others; and how women behave accordingly. In other words, and as we suggested in our introduction, our focus lies with the ongoing reconstruction of menopausal subjectivities through the dys-appearing body. This is informed by Freeman’s (2010) critique of contemporary work arrangements in late capitalism and in particular her assertion that the “always on” mentality that contemporary work arrangements in late capitalism require is much more challenging to maintain when one’s body is behaving unpredictably. We also develop Leder’s arguments around dys-appearance and misrecognition by: arguing that it is frequently the intermittent character of menopausal symptoms which generates the telic demand for the women we interviewed, rather than his suggestion that menopause is a “regular” material transformation; emphasizing that being worried about social misrecognition seems as discomfiting as such misrecognition itself; and indicating how our respondents began to re-recognize their bodies and their selves. Our findings therefore illustrate the demands that menopause places on women in organizations—in terms of difficult symptoms, work pressures, and social constructions around gendered embodiment and age—but also how women actively negotiate and manage these.
Methodology
Although Noortje and Jo have long shared an interest in bodies, embodiment, and organizations, the data we draw on here come from two entirely independent sets of qualitative interviews. It was during a catch-up conversation that we realized similar themes were occurring across both, which led us to co-write this paper. The first set of interviews, which were cross-sectional, was conducted by Noortje and Patricia and two of their colleagues between June and October 2018 with 40 Netherlands-based participants working at University X. All volunteered to take part after a call was circulated through the university website, and informed consent was obtained prior to the interviews.
Those who took part worked as support staff, in management and teaching, and ranged in age between 44 and 61. They were first asked in general about their experiences of the menopause, such as when they initially realized they were going through this life phase and which symptoms they were experiencing (if any). Following this, they were asked how the menopause affected their working lives. For example, Noortje and Patricia asked them to describe instances when the menopause first came up at work, and what they did to manage symptoms and flare ups.
The second data set comes from longitudinal interviews undertaken at Northshire, a pseudonymous UK NHS Foundation Trust, between November 2018 and September 2019. Jo conducted these after being commissioned to evaluate the effects of the Trust’s menopause guidance and program of support, launched in October 2018. The invitation to participate in this research was released at the same time, and outlined the following research objectives: (1) to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the introduction of a menopause policy and program of support at Northshire Hospitals in terms of its impact on staff’s knowledge, attitudes and experience; and (2) to evaluate the impact of the policy on: (a) intention to leave, reduce working hours or take a career break amongst women workers with difficult menopausal symptoms; (b) sickness absence amongst this group; and (c) staff morale overall.
Of the 10 women involved, all of whom again volunteered to take part and completed informed consent forms, seven were interviewed three times, two twice, and one once, totaling 26 individual interviews. Although there were therefore far fewer participants in the interviews than at University X, the Northshire data set is not much smaller given that most were interviewed at least twice. However, the much smaller number of respondents overall at Northshire does of course mean that fewer voices are present in these data, which we fully acknowledge as a limitation of this research.
The Northshire design was agreed ahead of time with the Trust’s Chief Nurse, who spearheaded the development of the guidance and support program, and her team. Research involving NHS staff in the UK has to be approved by the Health Research Authority and the project also received a positive opinion from [name of university] Human Research Ethics Committee before data collection began. The data set, further, forms the basis for analysis in Brewis (2024). The ten participants worked in professional services, clinical and management roles. Nine identified as either perimenopausal or post-menopausal and they were between 39 and 59 years old. The 10th was pre-menopausal but line managed menopausal staff. 3 All agreed to quotation of verbatim extracts from their interviews in publications beyond the evaluation report.
As additional context, and although the UK is undoubtedly much further ahead in terms of public awareness and workplace initiatives around menopause than the Netherlands (see e.g. Menopause Friendly Accreditation UK, n.d.), the Northshire data we draw on come from the first and second interviews. This is because the first interview in particular concentrated on individual symptoms more than its successors, which focused on the intervention at the Trust in more depth per the project’s research objectives. But it is also significant because the first two rounds of interviews were undertaken in late 2018 and spring-summer 2019. At this point something like 10% of UK organizations had a form of menopause support in place (Beck et al., 2020) whereas more recent data suggest this figure is now 46% (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2023a). Northshire was also a very early mover in the NHS in this regard, and the guidance and support program had only been in place for between 6 and 9 months when the second round of interviews happened. All of this is to say that menopause was certainly not normalized in Northshire at the time, and wider societal awareness in the UK was just beginning to develop. So it is not surprising to us that the themes we detected in the data, despite the different national locations, are fairly consistent.
That said, it would of course be helpful to understand whether the experiences reported here are still commonplace in these two organizations, especially given the huge strides that UK employers have made in addressing menopause as a workplace issue in the interim. While we have not carried out more contemporary research at either empirical site, it is nonetheless possible that at the micro level women’s experiences may not have significantly changed for the better in Northshire in particular. We base this speculation on the latest survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2023b). One of their key findings was that, even in organizations where specific menopausal support was in place, 74% of respondents in these environments nonetheless reported that their symptoms mainly affected them negatively at work.
It is also worth remarking on the different organizational contexts here—an NHS Trust made up of three hospitals and a university. However, of the nine perimenopausal or post-menopausal participants at Northshire, only three held clinical roles, with two working shifts. This could theoretically present challenges where staff are experiencing menopause-related insomnia, but neither shift-worker connected these phenomena. The other key difference in working conditions is that four Northshire respondents—Alison (age 46), Denise (age 52), Marie (age 59), and Sarah (age 55)—wear uniforms for work. These are either a tunic and trousers, a dress or overalls, and are made of thick, synthetic material. So, as Denise suggests in her first interview, this can be difficult because “I get hot quite easily and especially being menopausal, I’ve found I get really hot quite quickly.” Yet work attire was also mentioned quite often as problematic for the same reasons by the Dutch interviewees. No other notable differences were detected between groups of workers within Northshire or between the data gathered at the Trust and University X.
We initially coded our own data sets using a combination of Atlas, NVivo and manual thematic analysis in an abductive process. After Noortje translated the Dutch data into English, we combined the codes and discussed overlaps and differences between the two sets. This round of coding revealed the importance of various forms of misrecognition in the experiences of our interviewees. We then used Leder’s concepts of dys-appearance, affective call, telic demand and corporeal hermeneutics to read and re-read the transcripts and initial coding together and formulated our themes: (1) misrecognition and re-recognition of the body; (2) misrecognition and re-recognition of the self; and (3) misrecognition and re-recognition by others. Table 1 illustrates how we moved from the coding to the themes and includes example quotes.
Examples of coding, quotes and themes.
We don’t make any claims around either our own objectivity or the generalizability of the findings, except to note that this paper is unusual because it brings together qualitative data about menopause at work generated in two countries. Instead, we regard the data as artifactual of the separate interview processes and emphasize that we ourselves are implicated in the analysis (Corlett and Sharon, 2018; Duncombe and Jessop, 2012). This is especially the case because Jo is post-menopausal, Noortje pre-menopausal, and Patricia perimenopausal. We used this to our advantage, however, because Jo and Patricia could reflect on the data from their own experiences, recognizing particular feelings and responses quickly, while Noortje could ask critical questions from the position as an inexperienced but interested ally.
We discuss our findings next. In this section we take our modalities of Lederian misrecognition in order—of the body, of the self and by other people—as well as signaling what we see as re-recognition in each modality.
Findings
Misrecognition and re-recognition of the body
All of our participants recounted dealing with the unpredictable bodily changes which menopause often brings at work. Josee (age 55, University X), for instance, said: Sometimes I thought ‘Oh [my menstruation] is done’, and then a bit later there was another tsunami. That uncertainty, that has bothered me most. I can’t even count the times. . . I have had a number of times when I was at a client’s and I got up and then ‘Oooohhh, please push the chair back under the table!’. And that was just so horrible. And you have even prepared by putting on black trousers. You try to take everything into account and then it still happened. [Blood] leaked through on all sides.
Here Josee describes how she had on several occasions believed the menstrual flooding which is a symptom of her menopause had come to an end. We read this through Leder (1990) as an instance of her body dys-appearing and then moving out of conscious awareness again because her menstruation seemed to stop. In other words, Josee was seemingly very discommoded by her periods, at work in particular, because they appeared without warning and were extremely heavy, often soaking through on to her clothes and being visible to others. As such her body was exhibiting, in Leder’s terms, “a foreign will” (p. 87). Here we detect something else which Leder does not entirely account for. Although he argues that cis women’s reproductive lives involve “regular and even extreme bodily shifts” (p. 89—emphasis added) like menopause, which can occasion “moments of discomfort and dysfunction,” he does not extend this thinking to unpack the irregularity of menopausal symptoms in particular—something which seems to be at the core of his theorizing of pain and illness in what he characterizes as their sheer unexpectedness.
Moreover, when Josee began to experience extended intervals between periods, she came to believe they had stopped: her body began to disappear back under the surface of her consciousness. As she says, she has nonetheless been caught completely off guard by continued flooding during numerous client meetings; and its unpredictability was what she found most distressing. Here there is a profound disjuncture (perhaps even a dys-juncture) between the expectations of work – attending these meetings regularly – and Josee’s body behaving unpredictably with the sudden onset of excessive bleeding. The affective call of these episodes, their “gnawing, distasteful quality” (Leder, 1990: 73), is clear to us in her observation that they were “just so horrible.”
The continued dys-appearance of Josee’s menopausal body appears to be especially troubling for her because of her mistaken belief that her body was finally back under her control because she was now post-menopausal. But what we also see here is that she has latterly begun to re-recognize her body as still prone to flooding, and behaves accordingly by wearing black trousers to work, however unsuccessful this planning ahead to meet Leder’s (1990: 77) telic demand sometimes proves to be.
Other participants talked about initially being surprised when their menopausal bodies dys-appeared at work. In 53-year-old University X respondent Juliet’s case, her body began to sweat excessively due to her hot flushes, something which echoes Josee’s menstrual flooding being noticeable to others: I have experienced, like ‘Oh . . . I can smell myself. And the smell is breaking through the deodorant. I’m not used to that’. But now I realize it might be a menopause thing. That actually makes sense (emphasis added).
Again, this symptom raises Juliet’s bodily functions to the level of her acute awareness because it deviates from what she is “used to.” The viscerality of her lived experience of this sweating is captured in her body odor overcoming her deodorant, so she can smell herself. Juliet’s body dys-appears here because it surges into her consciousness. However, she was later able to rationalize these episodes as being part of her menopause transition, which reduced her sense of shock and seemed to give way to relief—“That actually makes sense.” We suggest that Juliet begins to re-recognize her body here as going through “a menopause thing.”
Northshire respondent Claire, who is 54, likewise suggests that her symptoms come and go, and re-emerge unexpectedly. In her case recurrence is often triggered by work demands: [W]hen I had the hot flushes, I would say [they are] probably the worst of all the symptoms, and stress brings it on so easily. If I have something, and it can be only low level stress [. . .] it doesn’t have to be anything major, but something crops up at work and I have to start thinking about it, immediately I have to put my fan on, you know, straight away, or I get [. . .] a bit of grief or something like that and immediately [. . .] So if there’s anything that comes in that needs attention, it immediately affects my control, temperature control, and the fact that I can be up and down like a yoyo within a day, you know.
Claire’s body can therefore dys-appear several times during a typical working day in its heightened reaction to even “low level stress.” Again, this is something she has only experienced since entering perimenopause, which illustrates the tension between her menopausal body and the demands of her job—she is a team leader and often has to respond to situations of the kind she describes at work in short order. Claire’s reference to control here seems particularly indicative of her no longer recognizing her unpredictably hot and sweaty body, as does the metaphor of the yoyo. But there is also what we detect as an element of re-recognition and planning for this telic demand, because she has obtained a desk fan in case these flushes occur in the office.
Other women told us they feared their menopausal symptoms were actually indicative of something much worse. Increased forgetfulness seemed particularly frightening, as Stephanie (age 52, Northshire) explains: Sometimes I can remember somebody’s first name but literally I’m searching for this surname and it scares the living daylights out of me. I’ve often wondered whether I’ve got early onset dementia.
University X respondent Birgit, also 52, had a comparable experience and even visited a neurologist because she feared something was seriously wrong with her cognitively. This seems to us to be an especially striking example of Leder’s (1990: 78) corporeal hermeneutics in that she sought advice from a medical professional as part of her “ongoing interpretive quest” into her menopausal body. Elizabeth (age 49, Northshire), on the other hand, kept her worries to herself as part of what we see as the same quest: The things that I’ve found really, really difficult are I’ve struggled to focus, and I’ve struggled with my short-term memory, and I did go through quite a period of time before I really cottoned on to the menopause thinking, you know, ‘Have I got early onset dementia?’. And that really [. . .] preyed on my mind for a few months. Didn’t actually discuss it with anybody, just had this sense of my memory is not what it was.
Like other respondents, it took Elizabeth some time to re-recognize her body as menopausal rather than her having dementia. We can see again that this was a relief for her, as the possibility had “really [. . .] preyed on [her] mind.”
At times, the respondents’ efforts to manage their menopausal bodies at work, to attend to their telic demands so they disappear again, can take priority over everything else. As Nanouk (age 57, University X) explains, she may not have the time or the energy to really pay attention during meetings because she is too busy trying to get her hot flushes under control: [When I get a hot flush] I will be in a meeting, just surviving for a while. I won’t hear what people are saying, I miss information, I can’t pay attention to looks people are giving each other because all I can focus on is my own body. To control the perspiration, to hide the redness and to make sure I end up in a cool spot. That’s what happens, until it passes. I can easily miss half of a meeting this way.
Here we see how Nanouk’s body dys-appears and thus becomes visible and sense-able both to her and her colleagues as an entity outside of herself—it turns into something that demands attention until it disappears again. This resonates with how Leder (1990: 77) conceptualizes dys-embodiment: “I no longer simply ‘am’ my body. . . Now I ‘have’ a body, a perceived object in the world.” In these instances, her dys-appearing body places a telic demand on Nanouk to effortfully manage it back into alignment with chrononormative ideals, so she can resume her performance as a viable, productive worker-citizen, one who is not distracted by the viscerality of hormonal vicissitudes like intense heat, redness, and sweating.
For us, her remarks also evoke Leder’s argument about dys-appearance plunging us back into the present, so that, as we suggested above, we are temporarily outside of our projects, our goals and the unfolding of time. During meetings when she experiences a hot flush, Nanouk is “just surviving for a while”—she is unable to listen to others or to notice how they are reacting to her. Instead, “all I can focus on is my own body.” Nonetheless, her account also seems to us to indicate some re-recognition of her now-different menopausal body in her suggesting that she tries to find a “cool spot” in the room when she must attend such events.
Other women in our respondent group chose medication as a route to subdue their misfiring menopausal bodies at work and to allow them to keep up their work pace and productivity. For University X respondent Yvette (age 52), this is to combat her insomnia so she is fit for work the next day: Something I do is I take two painkillers. Acetaminophen
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will make you very tranquil of course. So I resort to taking two of those because it’s better than being hugely sleep deprived. My biggest problem going through the menopause is sleep deprivation. I just really need my sleep in order to be able to function at work and I have a very hard time sleeping nowadays.
Here we see how the dys-appearing menopausal body once again sends an “affective call” (Leder, 1990: 73) to Yvette which constitutes “a sensory aversiveness and world disruptions” (p. 77). The “cry out for removal” (Leder, 1990) of the telic demand of insomnia, which otherwise would mean she cannot “function at work,” translates into taking painkillers to sleep. As such, Yvette now re-recognizes her body as menopausal and takes preventative action accordingly to ensure she is not “hugely sleep deprived” at work the next day.
In all of these examples—Josee’s unexpected menstrual flooding; Juliet’s surprising body odor; the hot flushes that recur for Claire and Nanouk; Stephanie, Birgit and Elizabeth’s worries about early onset dementia; and Yvette’s insomnia—the menopausal body dys-appears, affectively, viscerally and unpleasantly hailing participants into the present. This is a present in which they don’t recognize their bodies as part of themselves. The efforts many of them make to suppress their symptoms can be considered as a response to the telic demand that the dys-appearing body makes; and illustrate the “always on” mentality of chrononormativity. Indeed, for Josee and Yvette this is also about preparing to be “always on,” which is exacerbated during menopause precisely because of the irregularity of symptoms. What we likewise detect are suggestions that these unpredictable affective calls, if they recur over time, lead to a re-recognition of these women’s bodies as different/menopausal and consequent changes in their behavior—or, put differently, to Leder’s (1990: 78) “corporeal hermeneutics.”
Yet our data indicate that menopause not only leads women to misrecognize (and perhaps later re-recognize) their own bodies. It also leads to a misrecognition of self, as we now explain.
Misrecognition and re-recognition of the self
Here we argue that the pace and intensity of work were understood in terms of how participants felt better able to cope with the requirements of their jobs before perimenopause. In other words, our data suggest they no longer recognize their mid-life working selves, especially when compared to their former selves. For example, Claire describes feeling that she would now be unable to keep up with the demands of her previous job compared to those of her current role as an educator: I probably more easily feel a bit overwhelmed . . . I worked in acute care for many years, and that was normal, that was the day job, that people were at you all the time and all sorts of stuff was going off, and now sometimes I look back and I think ‘How did I cope with that for so long every day, all day?’. I thought, ‘I couldn’t cope with that now’.
In this observation, which also forms part of the title of this paper, Claire paints a vivid picture of a frantic and intense acute care environment where her workload was unpredictable and almost anything could happen, compared to the more tranquil department where she now works. Further to her comments above about minor stressors as triggers for her hot flushes, she added that I find it doesn’t take much to make me feel stressed. It could be something crops up and I’ve got to deal with it [. . .] and then all of a sudden it seems to have like an intensity to it, and it feels a big thing, and I just think ‘Why do I feel that this is something probably bigger than it actually is?’ [. . .] and then, of course, I have to write everything down, because otherwise I can’t remember.
Here Claire notes that her ability to multi-task, to deal with multiple and fluctuating demands and stress in general and to remember all the things she needs to do have declined since her perimenopause began. Her use of the word “intensity” is interesting here, because it signifies dys-appearance, something unfamiliar and affectively unsettling, triggered by tasks which she feels she would have taken in her stride before perimenopause.
At University X, flexible, open plan workspaces were introduced a few years before the interviews, which seem to increase the challenges for our respondents in managing their menopausal symptoms. Birgit talked about her difficulties concentrating and how the hustle and bustle of these spaces is now often too much for her to cope with.
I notice that my ability to concentrate has decreased, especially when I am in such super-busy surroundings. I have given up the hope that I will be able to be productive at all in these situations.
Here, Birgit references her dwindling capacity to focus, something which she suggests was not a characteristic of hers until perimenopause. She also indexes how the alterations to her material environment have exacerbated this, in what appears to be an attempt by University X to increase the demands on workers’ performance. However, Birgit has reluctantly come to terms with this situation, changing her working patterns accordingly: So my approach is that, on the days that I am in the office, I will do small things; things I don’t have to concentrate for, things that don’t need much focus. And everything that does need that, I will do at home. So I definitely look for a quiet place. And if I don’t, I will be punished for it immediately, because I am just not able to handle it. I will be overstimulated by everything.
As such, if Birgit doesn’t attend to her body’s telic demand for a quieter environment, it dys-appears even more and she ends up feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.
Both Claire and Birgit compare their current selves to their former selves at work and find the current lacking. They frame this in terms of keeping up—Claire suggesting she would no longer be able to do her old job in acute care where “people were at you all the time and all sorts of stuff was going off,” as well as indexing her dwindling ability to deal with stress and her memory problems; and Birgit saying she has given up any hope of being productive in the open plan environment of the university. Both are more than aware of the amount of work they need to produce and seek to maximize their “socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments” (Freeman, 2010: 5). They therefore take on extra labor accordingly, Claire managing her new menopausal self by “writing everything down” and Birgit by dividing her tasks between campus and home. This additional effort is also intended to avoid any perception by others that they are under-performing or dilatory. This reflects the possibility of social misrecognition of menopausal women at work which we discuss in the last section of our findings.
We also see Leder’s (1990: 77) telic demand in two other accounts of the work environment at University X. Pilar (age 55) blames the new office design for the aggravation of her symptoms in saying that: “Our workspaces are difficult to navigate for other people too, but if you are menopausal and you have to concentrate. . . I think it’s a disaster.” The alternative—booking a small glass single occupancy space—is not a good solution, according to Ulrike (also 55): “It is impossible if you want some time alone, some isolation. Because you’ll still be in a glass box that doesn’t have a window and where there is no air.” Here, the menopausal body dys-appears again, but this time at the intersection of symptoms to do with concentration and body temperature, and small, stuffy, non-ventilated spaces where everything you do is visible to passers-by. Pilar’s comment is especially interesting as she draws a direct comparison between her non-menopausal colleagues, who she says also struggle with the office design, and her menopausal self, for whom it is “a disaster.” As such she has recognized that this new self cannot cope at all with the changes in office design.
These narratives illustrate the difficulties these women experience in performing the appropriately gendered, aging and abled working selves that chrononormativity demands—especially in relation to late capitalist, neoliberal norms around work pace and consistency—because of the recurrent disruptions caused by menopausal symptoms. They also suggest a reluctant coming to terms with their new menopausal selves which means they cannot work as quickly or at the same intensity, concentrate as well or manage in warm and artificially lit workplace environments as they used to pre-perimenopause.
Further, we see some re-recognition of a new menopausal self, expressed in Claire’s acceptance that she “couldn’t cope with that now,” and as such is glad she no longer works in acute care. We identify something similar in Birgit’s having “given up the hope that I will be able to be productive at all in these situations,” where she now varies where she undertakes certain tasks to accommodate this new self. Again, here there seems to be evidence of Leder’s corporeal hermeneutics in these respondents’ efforts to find workarounds to make their menopausal bodies disappear once again at work. However, and as with our findings about the new menopausal body, this re-recognition does not appear to be a gradual accommodation and acceptance of menopausal changes in body and self but more a grudging realization of the inevitable. The “inevitable” here appears to be the fact that it is these women who must alter their working habits rather than expecting any adjustments from their employers.
Finally in our Findings section, and as we have already seen, these respondents’ bodily dys-appearance produces social misrecognition at work—or at least the perceived risk of such misrecognition.
Misrecognition and re-recognition by others
In some instances, the fear of misrecognition by others made participants simply try to push through at work despite sometimes debilitating symptoms. These women felt unable to discuss their menopausal status because they sensed a general lack of organizational understanding about the difficulties this life stage can cause. Kitty (age 57, University X), for example, ended up on sick leave: I am convinced that part of my burnout can be explained by fluctuations in hormones [. . .] I think there is too little attention to [the menopause]. I see colleagues my age who are struggling, in situations of burnout, and I think it could very well be more connected to each other than we would like to admit.
Kitty’s colleague Frederique (age 50) also talked about the demands placed upon her menopausal body within the university, and described her efforts to keep going nonetheless. She used the construction “you don’t count any more” in relation to herself: a construction which explicitly points to the social misrecognition and devaluation of aging bodies at work: Well, basically you don’t count any more. And sometimes you disguise [symptoms] a bit because you don’t want to be judged based on this [. . .] If I listened to my body then there would definitely be moments when I would stay at home, because it’s just too much. Headaches, fatigue, really not feeling well or that my period is so heavy that I keep walking back and forward to the toilet. In those moments I have to think ‘OK, toughen up and keep going’. Because if I called in sick and it happened multiple times . . . I just wonder how I will be judged for that (emphasis added).
Frederique’s narrative shows how, like Kitty, she feels compelled to silence herself and her body to hide her menopausal symptoms. This dovetails with our earlier findings about the effort needed to manage the dys-appearing body: as Leder (1990: 86) describes it, “in order to return to normal mastery, the body itself becomes the focus of ongoing hermeneutic and pragmatic projects.” Yet Frederique’s words highlight the fear of social misrecognition as a driving force of this affective call, as well as the efforts she makes to compensate, to “toughen up,” so that her body disappears again - at least for the outside world. In both these accounts we also see the toll this can take. In Frederique’s case, she feels unable to “listen” to her body because she worries about how it will be received if she keeps taking sick leave because she is exhausted or has a headache or a very heavy period. Yet Kitty burned out completely because of the same sort of behavior—her menopausal body refused to be managed back into disappearance so she could stay at work. The fear of social misrecognition therefore produces fear of attracting workplace censure, even despite the viscerality of these women’s menopausal symptoms. It may even mean that they end up with much more serious health problems, as Kitty did.
Northshire respondent Elizabeth, who was relatively new to her role during the first round of interviews, also compares her performance at work during menopause with how she was able to do things before. This speaks to the theme of misrecognition of self but, as far as social misrecognition is concerned, she expresses particular concern that her colleagues judged her accordingly: [I keep] feeling that overwhelming sense of ‘They must think I’m useless just because I can’t remember right now. I would have been just so on it before’. And because I haven’t worked with them that long, and they’ve only known me as I am now, I just don’t think . . . they must think ‘Why on earth was she ever recruited?’.
Elizabeth’s ‘overwhelming sense of ‘they must think I’m useless” points toward what Leder (1990: 96) describes as “a radical split . . . between the body I live out and my object-body, now defined and delimited by a foreign gaze.” Elizabeth starts seeing herself through the eyes of her colleagues. Importantly, again it is the fear of social misrecognition which underpins this dys-appearance, as opposed to its actuality, something which Leder’s thesis doesn’t account for. As such the interview extracts above point toward the entanglement of the dys-appearing menopausal body with chrononormative demands regarding time and productivity, leading not only to a misrecognition of the body and self, but also the fear that others may question the value of these women in their workplaces.
Moreover, as Northshire nurse Alison indicates, the likelihood of social misrecognition might vary with tenure in a specific role. In other words, if co-workers are familiar with you, it is easier to ask for leeway in terms of extra breaks etcetera to accommodate one’s symptoms and to avoid such misrecognition; which we might reconstruct as an expectation that colleagues will re-recognize you as a menopausal person. Alison compares this to when she works bank shifts at Northshire—that is, non-rostered, voluntary overtime which requires her to work in a different area of the hospital from her home ward: [D]epending on what team you’ve got and how well you know your colleagues, if you [were] to go on a bank shift, for instance, and do that, you’ve not really built up that rapport with the team for them to get to know [you] and value that you’re a hard worker. So they could just look at it like ‘What? You’re pulling a fast one there’. I’m not saying that they would, but I don’t think it would do you any favours in that respect to be nipping off for more breaks.
Alison stresses that, on her bank shifts, she worries that other staff would see any request for an additional break as shirking because they don’t know her very well. Her account illustrates the chrononormative pressures (especially limitations regarding breaks) that compel her to continue regardless. Her dys-appearing menopausal body clashes with the marketized ideology of productivity, pace and intensity that structures her work as a nurse and produces a fear of being labeled as under-performing or lazy. Here then, our respondents index what Leder (1990: 95) refers to as the “power of negation” vested in others in this regard, especially when workplace relationships are superficial as in Alison’s bank shifts example. Yet what these data highlight once more is the effect of the possibility that this power might be exerted, as opposed to negation itself.
This theme also speaks to the need for constant vigilance lest one be misrecognized as under-performing, or not presenting an appropriately professional workplace performance—a social form of the telic demand which the dys-appearing menopausal body makes of these women. Sometimes this also necessitates planning ahead as a result of Leder’s corporeal hermeneutics. Like many other women we interviewed, Joanneke (age 51, University X) talks about bringing extra clothes to work to be able to change in case of excessive sweating: I sweat much more and quicker. And I don’t mean just a few drops, it really runs off my head and back in a stream. I usually bike here in the morning, so I take some extra clothes because that is not good.
Trix (age 57, University X) echoes Claire at Northshire when she recounts how stress triggers her hot flushes, saying this happens more often in small, confined spaces. Therefore, she always reserves a big room for meetings or when she has to teach: I do take it into account. In general, I book the biggest rooms I can find. Because just someone sitting close makes me feel . . . if the conversation will be stressful and I feel some tension, I know it will trigger me. I will get flushed, the sweat will start dripping from my neck. So I have to make sure that there is enough room around me when I know the meeting will not be easy [. . .] The hot flushes will of course appear when you make a mistake.
Again, we note the viscerality of these experiences as recounted by our participants—here in the descriptions of sweat streaming or dripping from their bodies. Equally, their comments once more speak to having to plan ahead to withstand the telic demand of the menopausal body and in particular to avoid this being noticed by colleagues. But there is nothing pointing to colleagues actually making negative judgments of Joanneke’s sweating or Trix’s hot flushes—instead they seem to have internalized the potential of Leder’s (1990: 96) “highly distanced, antagonistic, or objectifying” gaze from their co-workers.
Overall, our empirical material suggests the menopausal experience can be understood in terms of its visceral disruptions through the entanglement of the chrononormative demands of the neoliberal workplace with the materiality of the dys-appearing body.
Discussion and conclusion
We have analyzed qualitative interview data from the Netherlands and the UK to explore the experiences of working cis women going through menopause. For us these data are very suggestive of how their experiences are laced with confusion, doubt and shock as their menopausal bodies disrupt the chrononormative demands of the workplace by dys-appearing irregularly. We argue that these dys-appearances produce three modalities of misrecognition. The first relates to our participants experiencing their bodies as misfiring, unpredictable and beyond their control. When enduring the ebb and flow of menopausal symptoms at work, their bodies dys-appear in very visceral, often distressing ways which they do not recognize. As such, these women feel alienated from their bodies.
The second modality of misrecognition is of themselves. As their bodies dys-appear, disrupting their efforts to perform in chrononormative ways at work, the participants report considerable annoyance at no longer being able to work at the same pace and intensity as they did formerly. Consequently, they feel alienated from themselves. Third, these women are worried about being misrecognized by others, in the sense invoked by Leder. In other words, they fear their co-workers will start to regard them as under-performing, overly emotional, or even shirking because of their menopausal symptoms. As such they feel alienated from others and are concerned about their reactions as a result. Overall, our findings therefore show how these women’s subjectivities are continually reconstructed through an entanglement of the materiality of their menopausal embodiment—the dys-appearance of the body—with neoliberal workplace demands regarding uninterrupted productivity and efficiency.
Such experiences are also captured in Jack et al.’s (2019) concept of helical time, which they derive from a reading of interview data through Lois McNay and Elizabeth Grosz. In helical time, “the biorhythms of the menopausal body were portrayed as out of kilter with the temporal expectations of the organization, cleaving apart individual and organizational time” (pp. 132–3). What is interesting is that these difficult menopausal episodes are themselves short-lived, and yet Jack et al.’s respondents very often altered their behavior on a more long-term basis—as did ours—to ameliorate the disruption which resulted.
Indeed, following these three modalities of misrecognition, our participants often engaged in Lederian corporeal hermeneutics to hide and/or manage their symptoms and perform a viable gendered, aged and abled subjectivity at work, leading to re-recognition within the three modalities of body, self and (sometimes) others. The labor this involves dovetails with findings from previous studies on menopause as a workplace issue (Atkinson et al., 2021b; Beck et al., 2023; Kittell et al., 1998; Putnam and Bochantin, 2009; Steffan, 2021) and springs from the disadvantages created when one inhabits a dys-appearing body in a workplace which expects all bodies to be in a constant state of disappearance. Corporeal hermeneutics are thus yet another form of work undertaken by these women to ameliorate bodily dys-appearance at work and establish re-recognition.
To be clear, our participants certainly do not seem to conform to “the deficient, passive, frail or overdetermined bodies of dominant menopausal discourse or the disparaging representations of the older female body/worker” (Jack et al., 2019: 139). This is especially evident in their ongoing and at times demanding efforts to force their bodies to disappear again at work. But what we do see in their narratives is a resurgence of their bodies whereby their physicality bursts through, often in unsettling ways, which makes adherence to workplace expectations much more challenging than it has been in the past. Furthermore, this bursting through is erratic, cannot always be planned for and is temporary in its duration. However, what it also produces—at least as we see it—are the corporeal hermeneutics we have indexed throughout our findings, which in themselves produce re-recognition of a different body and a different self; one that is going through menopause.
Thus, our theoretical framework allows us, first, to better understand the surging through of matter in disruptive ways via Leder’s concept of dys-appearance. The chrononormative requirement to be “always on” at work is made even more complex when our bodies dys-appear, especially when they do this in unpredictable, short-lived ways as is typically the case during menopause. Second, we seek to understand our respondents’ reactions to these dys-appearances as a series of fairly grudging re-recognitions which spur effortful attempts to force their bodies back into submission; these in themselves being labor intensive. We consider all of these efforts to be undergirded by the individualizing tendencies and chrononormative demands of the neoliberal workplace.
We also modestly extend Leder’s theorizing by, first, adding the possibility of re-recognition of our bodies and selves and of these bodies and selves by others. Second, in our data the fear of social misrecognition seems to be as discomfiting as its actuality, thus accounting for the ways in which the embodied and social realms are intricately entwined rather than always privileging the physical body as Leder does. This is especially important since his theory doesn’t account for marginalized embodiment, as lived by trans, fat, disabled and racialized people amongst others, and whose heightened body-consciousness is produced through ongoing discrimination in the social realm. Third, we emphasize that it is the irregularity of menopausal symptoms which often creates the telic demand in our data, as opposed to his argument that menopause represents a “regular” bodily shift for cis women.
Taken together, we suggest that our application of Leder here as well as our expansion of his ideas, presents some intriguing possibilities for studies of misrecognition in the organizational context. For example, research on menopause as a workplace issue, including the current paper, draws disproportionately on the experiences of white, cis, middle class, heterosexual women. Echoing Atkinson et al. (2021b), Beck et al. (2023), Riach and Jack (2021), and Yoeli et al. (2021), we suggest future research should take non-western concepts and more diverse experiences of menopause at work into account to tease out what these can teach us about the materiality of embodiment for all workers with ovarian systems. Equally, there is still a paucity of studies which track how colleagues and managers feel about and react to what menopausal workers experience as bodily dys-appearances. The anticipatory fear of social misrecognition our respondents report, which is also apparent in other menopause at work research (e.g. Steffan, 2021; Whiley et al., 2023), deserves more unpicking as to the extent to which it is grounded in the likelihood or otherwise of this kind of misrecognition. Another possibility would be to employ the approach we have used here to tease out how the modalities of misrecognition and re-recognition play out for workers with other sorts of non-normative bodies, especially those who live at the intersections of various categories of difference such as cis minority ethnic women, or transgender people who have disabilities.
In closing, we hope that other scholars will be inspired to follow up these and other potential avenues for enquiry in mobilizing dys-appearance and mis/re-recognition as we have done here.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to the 50 women who very kindly gave up their time to be interviewed for this paper, as well as to our associate editor and three reviewers.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by funding from The Open University Business School for travel and transcription of interviews.
