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 neoliberalising patriarchal university. We are raging. With the figure of the Crone, and feminist-killjoy-croning as our creative and livid research method (Ahmed, 2023), we squeeze time out/with impossible university spaces and schedules to tend to grey matters. The paper traces the normalisation of menopause policies in workplaces and universities, following the social trending and capitalisation 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) 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.