Anti-naturalism, technoscientific empowerment and rage: Insurgent feminist knowledge in an online menopause forum

This article explores feminist theorising about menopause in the world’s largest online menopause forum, r/menopause. Building on earlier feminist Internet research on menopause, it conceptualises this online theorising as a form of epistemic insurgency in relation to biomedicine. It analyses forum users’ comments about medical misogyny, menopausal hormone therapy and rage to demonstrate how their subjective experiences of menopause inform a vernacular feminist politics with its own unique configuration of the relationship between bodies, gender, biomedicine and biotechnology. Distinct from the postfeminist healthism which dominates media representations of menopause, this vernacular feminism parallels other feminist projects but is not reducible to them. The implications for feminism include the urgent need to address both these women’s alienation from biomedicine and recent problematic albeit well-intentioned feminist public health messaging.