New Rites of Passage - Transforming the Performative at Menopause

Abstract

This abstract, prepared for the 2018 International Women, Ageing and Media (WAM) Research Summer School addresses the representation of the post-menopausal life of women. Inherent in this artistic address is the question why in western society menopause is not defined as a natural process of transformation that has the potential to result in empowerment for the individual woman. The project ‘New Rites of Passage’ speaks of this potential as it might be depicted in performance video.

These videos are created as means to transgress the current social and cultural constraints in Western culture that are imposed on the female body and psyche at this significant stage in a woman’s life. ‘New Rites of Passage’ is a series of performance videos that actively contemplate and represent the process of change in identity at the menopause. Through the use of heuristic methodology, a broad methodology most often used in the social sciences, that is more akin to art therapy. Heuristics involves a process of internal search to discover the nature and meaning of experiences resulting in growing self-knowledge. In the project videos are intuitively performed and filmed employing the tripartite process of separation, transition and incorporation evident in a rite of passage. These stages of passage suggesting contemplation in separation from patriarchal constraints, transition of emerging new identity and reincorporation of the empowered true self.

In ‘New Rites of Passage’ the woman is seen to be actively contemplating the dissolving of outworn identities in preparation for transformation, suggested by a female figure observing the push and pull of the ocean. Transition in the repetition of wrapping and unwrapping of the body in cloth and bandages, and incorporation; a cloaked figure walking towards infinity surrounded by nature, striding confidently onwards in acceptance of her new circumstances and spiritual unity. In this way, the videos are signifying the search for a connection to a ‘true self’ through a transformational process specific to the menopause. This project recognises the process of menopause as arduous. The videos in New Rites of Passage allow the viewer to consider the notion of metamorphosis, where woman’s body and psyche develops self-knowledge, a new narrative and empowered identity.