‘The Hulk is the only menopausal role model in the history of TV and film’: Re-visioning the ‘messiness’ of menopause and Bridget Christie’s <i>The Change</i>

Menopausal protagonists have been virtually absent through screen history. Bridget Christie’s 2023-25 Channel 4 UK comedy-drama The Change , and its 50-year-old working-class menopausal heroine Linda, thus marks a noteworthy televisual and cultural moment. Here, the experiences and perspectives of the menopausal woman are not only at the heart of the narrative. Furthermore, The Change proffers a radical rethinking of the menopausal woman as something other than a spent or failing woman, as has been the predominant archetype through Western cultural histories. Linda’s new-found outspokenness, autonomy and defiance when she sets off for adventure in the Forest of Dean – having spent decades logging 3.5 million minutes of unacknowledged dreary household labour, and learned from her GP that she does not in fact have early-onset dementia but is menopausal – are not pathologised as the onset of midlife collapse or loss of womanhood. Instead, they mark the entry to a new phase of life, one heralded by embracing community and female friendship and (re)connecting with nature and the passages of time, the body and folk-culture, rather than the growing commercialisation of menopause. In this respect, the emergence of the series at this time both speaks to and defies the dominant neoliberal framework frequently underpinning the recent ‘menopausal turn’. Utilising interdisciplinary scholarship drawn from feminist media and television studies, cultural studies of menopause and eco-feminism, and through close textual analysis of the series and consideration of its promotion and reception, I explore how The Change resists contemporary imperatives to position menopause as a makeover opportunity embedded in resilience and consumerism, to instead imagine a culture which honours ageing women and wishes for them ‘may all your transitions be joyful’.