Croning academics: menopause matters in higher education

This writing is born out of our experiences of becoming older women, academy hags, facing the performative demands of the neoliberalizing patriarchal university. We are raging. With the figure of the Crone, and feminist-killjoy-croning as our creative and livid research method (Ahmed, S. 2023. Feminist Killjoy. London: Penguin Random House), we squeeze time out/with impossible university spaces and schedules to tend to grey matters. This paper traces the normalization of menopause policies in workplaces and universities, following the social trending and capitalization of menopausal and ageing matters. We question what menopause policies do and argue they constitute a failed project for the advancement of gender equality and should be abandoned. Inspired by Barad's (2021. "Dialogue with Karen Barad Dialogues on Agential Realism." In Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging in Worldings through Research Practice, edited by H. P. Juelskjær and A. W. Stine, 118–141. London: Taylor and Francis) call to engage in 'spacetimemattering', we create webs of entanglement through the objects of university menopause policies. We grey, fade out/ fit in, sweat, bleed, scowl. Powered by fury and frustration, we scrape away the genealogical underpinnings of menopausal bodyminds.