Politicizing menopausal flesh: Collective bodies and affective endurance in graphic narrative

Menopause is often stigmatized and viewed as a private health issue, contributing to the marginalization of aging female bodies. Despite the rise of medical humanities, menopause is rarely examined as a site of bodily regulation politics. This paper addresses this gap by examining Menopause: A Comic Treatment (2020), edited by MK Czerwiec, as a graphic narrative that reframes menopause as a collective, politically significant embodied experience, and argues how the collective graphic storytelling challenges the medical and cultural isolation of menopausal bodies. The anthology’s collective format and rejection of singular authorship function as a political strategy that resists the isolation imposed on menopausal femininity.Methodologically, this paper employs close visual-textual analysis of four selected narratives from the anthology by MK Czerwiec, Mimi Pond, Ajuan Mance, and Susan Squier and Shelley Wall, read as strategic components of a unified formal intervention. Drawing on feminist medical humanities (Emily Martin, Margaret Lock), biopolitical theory (Michael Foucault), and graphic medicine scholarship (Susan Squier, Ian Williams), the analysis shows how graphic form through humor, visual metaphor, fragmentation, and multimodality render menopausal experiences visible while exposing the institutional, cultural, and biomedical forces shaping aging femininity. Rather than treating comics as supplements to medical knowledge, this paper explores graphic narrative as an epistemological mode that generates embodied understanding. It argues that the politics of flesh shapes how institutional regulation of menopausal bodies reshapes affective life and endurance, foregrounding lived aging experience without reinforcing mind-body dualism. By framing the narrative representation of menopause as a political practice rather than a pathological condition, the paper contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of embodiment, narrative resistance, and the critical potential of graphic literature to challenge dominant stereotypes of gendered aging.