Afterword - Ecocritical menopause studies: An emergent investigative field

My intention here has been to emphasize in retrospection the union of this collection’s themes while also highlighting the original contribution each contributor makes to the critical ecocritical and ecofeminist scholarship around menopause. While recollection is indeed a crucial piece of a book’s own unique backstory, my musing in hindsight has thought through the collection’s chapters, each involving ecology and literature with the corporeal passages and transformations shaping the maturing subjectivities of selected fictional female characters, and how each contributor uncovers the intriguing and intricate literary imagery of this transitional milestone in selected works. This collection marks an attempt to enrich gaps in the current scholarship while uncovering possible future directions of theoretical enquiry in the form of ecocritical menopause studies. As an emergent paradigm, ecocritical menopause studies introduces menopause “as a category of analysis, asking how systems of power and knowledge are built upon its understanding, and furthermore, who benefits from these social constructions” (Bobel 2017). And in adopting a specifically ecofeminist standpoint, this collection underscores the ways in which ecocritical menopause studies presents a productive category of investigative review in exploring epistemological and authoritative systems via a literary lens in privileging menopause within eco-biophilic contexts of enquiry.