Emotion, Justice, and Hormonal Authority: A Discursive Approach to Menopause in Legal, Biomedical, and Digital Registers
摘要
The chapter synthesizes recent scholarship on how menopause is constructed across legal, biomedical, and digital domains, with comparative attention to English and Spanish contexts. Rather than adding new empirical material, it positions existing work within Legal Cultural Studies, feminist critiques of medicalization, and discourse analysis. Legal discourse establishes the contours of institutional recognition. In Spain, employment rulings rarely mention menopause, creating a pattern of silence. In the United Kingdom, it appears more regularly but is framed through affective judgments that portray women as unreliable or unstable. These contrasting modes of visibility shape how other domains interpret menopausal experience. Biomedical and divulgative texts extend these dynamics. Their metaphors of decline and imbalance echo legal assumptions about emotional volatility. Although presented as objective expertise, many guides merge biomedical claims with wellness rhetoric, promoting a version of postmenopausal life grounded in self-regulation and personal responsibility. This ideal of the disciplined subject mirrors expectations embedded in legal reasoning. Digital platforms, particularly Instagram, respond to these narratives by foregrounding empowerment, community, and transformation. Yet the shift is selective. Wellness-oriented and optimistic accounts gain prominence because they align with the self-management ethos promoted in legal and biomedical registers, while more ambivalent voices remain marginal. Across these connected sites, hormonal authority operates as a cultural logic that governs what becomes legible and credible. The analysis shows how law, medicine, and digital media shape menopause as both silence and spectacle, defining the terms on which midlife women can speak and be heard.