Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Andrea Peniche was born in Vila do Conde in 1974. She holds a degree in Philosophy and a Master’s in Gender Studies from the University of Porto. She works as an editor. She is an activist with the feminist collective A Coletiva, one of the organisers of the International Feminist Strike and of the Citizens’ Legislative Initiative Direito ao Cuidado, Cuidado com Direitos/Right to Care, Care with Rights. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Anticapitalista. Andrea is the author of Elas Somos Nós: O direito ao aborto como reivindicação democrática e cidadã (2007) and has contributed to several collective works and publications on feminist issues and political philosophy, including: Dicionário da História Partidária (2015), O Capital de Karl Marx 150 Anos Depois (2018), Combates contra a Extrema-Direita (2019), Não Posso Ser Quem Somos? Identidades e Estratégia Política da Esquerda (2020), and O Século XX Português. Política, Economia, Sociedade; Cultura, Império (2020).
Menopower
In a society marked by female reproductive control, menopausal bodies are represented as obsolete, useless, and worthless. We easily perceive this representation as an artifice because we know that, regardless of a woman's age, her body is always coveted as an economic body — indeed, one of the most valuable precisely because it is a body of free labor. A menopausal body does not generate life per se, but continues to be a body that produces and reproduces life and the way of life that ensures the functioning of societies. Between stigma and taboo, menopausal bodies have been ignored by science, medicine, and politics, as if there were no longer life, pleasure, or sexuality in bodies that do not menstruate, as if a woman's life were reducible to a function. We therefore need to think about how capitalism reorganizes its program of body domestication to apply it to menopausal bodies, and to occupy the space previously left to pseudoscience, business, and the commodification of our bodies.
Andrea Peniche was born in Vila do Conde in 1974. She holds a degree in Philosophy and a Master’s in Gender Studies from the University of Porto. She works as an editor. She is an activist with the feminist collective A Coletiva, one of the organisers of the International Feminist Strike and of the Citizens’ Legislative Initiative Direito ao Cuidado, Cuidado com Direitos/Right to Care, Care with Rights. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Anticapitalista. Andrea is the author of Elas Somos Nós: O direito ao aborto como reivindicação democrática e cidadã (2007) and has contributed to several collective works and publications on feminist issues and political philosophy, including: Dicionário da História Partidária (2015), O Capital de Karl Marx 150 Anos Depois (2018), Combates contra a Extrema-Direita (2019), Não Posso Ser Quem Somos? Identidades e Estratégia Política da Esquerda (2020), and O Século XX Português. Política, Economia, Sociedade; Cultura, Império (2020).
Menopower
In a society marked by female reproductive control, menopausal bodies are represented as obsolete, useless, and worthless. We easily perceive this representation as an artifice because we know that, regardless of a woman's age, her body is always coveted as an economic body — indeed, one of the most valuable precisely because it is a body of free labor. A menopausal body does not generate life per se, but continues to be a body that produces and reproduces life and the way of life that ensures the functioning of societies. Between stigma and taboo, menopausal bodies have been ignored by science, medicine, and politics, as if there were no longer life, pleasure, or sexuality in bodies that do not menstruate, as if a woman's life were reducible to a function. We therefore need to think about how capitalism reorganizes its program of body domestication to apply it to menopausal bodies, and to occupy the space previously left to pseudoscience, business, and the commodification of our bodies.
