Embodied transitions: Cultural framings of menopause among minority ethnic women

This article explores how menopause is narrated, embodied, and re-signified by minority ethnic women in the UK, drawing on in-depth qualitative research with participants of Chinese and Black ethnicities. Dominant narratives in the Global North frequently frame menopause through a biomedical lens of loss, dysfunction, and hormonal deficit, or more recently, as a postfeminist site of "ageless empowerment" marked by pharmaceutical rescue. This study challenges both framings by foregrounding the culturally situated accounts of women whose experiences remain marginal within mainstream menopause discourse. Participants often interpreted menopause as a rite of passage - inflected with spiritual, moral, and generational significance - and located this transition within the wider reproductive life course and within culturally distinct epistemologies. Chinese-heritage women drew on the cosmology of Traditional Chinese Medicine and seven-year life cycles, while Black participants evoked ancestral wisdom, intergenerational legacies, and culturally embedded notions of "strength". While clinical encounters were often fraught with misrecognition or silence, most participants refused narratives of decline and framed their decision not to use Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) as a moral and culturally grounded choice rather than an outcome of exclusion. The paper argues for a reconceptualisation of menopause as a culturally mediated life transition and calls for greater narrative plurality in feminist and clinical understandings of ageing. By centring women's own meanings and metaphors, this research contributes to an emergent body of work that resituates midlife not as rupture or rescue, but as a site of reflection, reckoning, and redefinition.