Blood and Nerves Revisited: Menopause and the Privatization of the Body in a Newfoundland Postindustrial Fishery

Abstract

Ethnographic data from a longitudinal, interpretive study of women's changing social and cultural constructions of menopause in a postindustrial, Newfoundland fishing village indicate that three major changes have taken place in the way women conceptualize female, reproductive life-cycle events and processes. First, folk idioms of nerves and blood that once linked soma, psyche, place, and tradition are now trivialized and have been superseded by biomedical models of menopause. Second, physicians, television, magazines, and school teachers have replaced the community's middle-aged women and the mutual communication of shared experience as major sources of information and advice on reproduction and aging. Third, women's bodies have become privatized, and bodily metaphors that once linked women in complex individual and collective assessments of shared, highly valued traditions and mutual judgment of moral character have lost their dominance in village life.

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