Charting Pathways from the Margins to the Menopausal Multiverse
From Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause by Omisade Burney-Scott
Margins are maps in disguise, coded with ancestral memory, ecological wisdom, and stories too bold for the center. The margins—the spaces where the stories, experiences, and wisdom of human beings deemed “other” have been relegated—are not places we chose. They were deliberately constructed by a dominant culture intent on controlling not just the narrative of menopause but the narratives of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power itself. For those of us who live at the intersections of these identities, the current menopause landscape could be considered inhospitable terrain, one that mirrors the broader societal patterns of erasure, exclusion, and pathologizing difference.