Delaying Menopause, Buying Time? Positioning Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation and Transplantation Technologies for Delaying Menopause in the Context of Women's Embodied Reproductive Choice and Agency Across the Lifecourse

Menopause discourse plays a powerful cultural role in the west, serving to mark a (negative) shift in women's social status, shaping both social norms and women's self-appraisals and dividing women's lifecourse into two: fertile and post-fertile, with value attributed only to the former. However, in 2019 a new ‘solution’ to the problem of menopause entered public discourse in the form of a new surgical technology, offered by the private health provider ProFam, to delay menopause via ovarian freezing techniques. Aimed in the first instance at women seeking to avoid the disruptions of severe symptoms, it also quickly became framed as a way in which (especially childless) women might extend their fertility. In this chapter I explore menopause discourse as it appears in medical and popular sources associated with this new technology, looking at the continuities and discontinuities with earlier forms of menopause discourse. I also take a broader view in placing technologies for delaying menopause in the context of reproductive technologies used by women at all stages of the lifecourse, critically examining the claims that they give women choice, freedom and control over time. I suggest that in fact they are implicated with rather more complex temporal structures, captured in the concept of ‘ambivalence’ and characterised by a mixture of gendered expectation, anticipation and suspension of agency. Finally, I explore whether it is menopause itself, rather than its delay, that, in serving to disrupt such temporal ambivalence among other things, can in fact introduce the possibility of freedom.