How to tame your hormones: menopause rage in media discourse

While feminist scholarship has challenged earlier misogynist discourses around menopause, menopause continues to be associated with women’s rage. Focusing on UK news and advice websites (2018–2024), we ask if and how this association is figured in contemporary cultural representations and what cultural and political work it performs. We situate our examination within three converging contexts: 1) the unleashing of public displays of women’s rage in Anglophone media in the wake of the #MeToo movement; 2) the changing cultural terrain of ageing women and their growing influence in public life; and 3) the rising visibility of menopause in the UK. We identify four distinct patterns: 1) construction of rage as a natural and biological symptom of the hormonally imbalanced ageing female body; 2) bundling of rage with other symptoms associated with menopause; 3) repudiation of menopausal women’s rage; and 4) positioning of menopausal women as responsible for managing their rage. These patterns render menopausal women’s rage visible while simultaneously disavowing and obscuring its legitimacy as an apt response to gender injustice. The analysis shows how menopausal women’s apt rage over gender and racial injustice is being depoliticized and reduced to hormone-induced behaviour that ageing women are exhorted to self-manage.