A Black feminist menopause convening in Durham reimagines “place” as something created by bodies and community.

Menopause—and the conversations surrounding it—is having a moment: Celebrities are speaking out, a commercial marketplace is booming, and state legislatures have introduced a wave of reforms over the past year. But as public attention grows, so too must our scrutiny of who benefits from this surge of visibility … and who risks being left behind.

This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, Flipping the Menopause Script Is Essential to Democracy, published in the middle of Black History Month, in partnership with Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause. This series helps flip the script, building on seven years of narrative and reproductive justice work led by Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause and commemorates “Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀: Remembering Blood,” a 2025 intergenerational gathering in Durham, N.C., centering marginalized menopausal communities. Menopause is not only a physical transition—it is also cultural, social and political. Recognizing its full scope is essential to advancing true health and civic equity. As one contributor reminds us: “We will not disappear with age. We will arrive.”

“We are a sight and a site, which we must cite.”

—Michelle Lanier for the launch of SOJOURNING on Sept. 8, 2024, at the Love House in Chapel Hill, N.C.

As the Internet increasingly becomes an echo chamber of recycled ideas and advocacies, you’ve likely encountered conversations online about the importance and the disappearance of “third places.”

Defined in the late 1990s by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, a third place is a separate physical location from your top two most frequently inhabited physical spaces: home and work. Third places are additionally defined as locations where you encounter your community, your people. A place where there is no to low entry cost, and minimal, non-performative effort required on the part of the participant.

In the Black community, what might come to mind are churches, barbershops and salons, neighborhood sports bars, even. Ideally, this third place would also be close in proximity to where you live and/or where you work.

But much has changed in the decades since the term was first introduced, with few of us working in the neighborhoods we live in—not to mention the fact that we hardly even know our neighbors anymore.

In 2019, an article in the public health journal Health & Place called for heightened research on the decrease in “third spaces” and its implications for the health and wellness of communities. This text and others indicate that the removal of a corner coffee shop where locals regularly gather, for instance, eliminates a site of care for those who once met there. Research also consistently finds that living in neighborhoods with limited resources—such as gathering or recreational spaces—is linked to poorer health outcomes, including elevated stress, chronic disease and increased mortality.

As digital spaces expand our reach while shrinking our real-life social circles, there have been loudening calls for people to once again gather around everyday things and shared experiences. 

Ironically, many shared experiences aren’t actually shared much at all, at least not outwardly. For instance, menarche—or a first period—was likely a secret affair involving pads passed hands by way of a trapper keeper in a middle school hallway. Socialized shame has kept many mutually experienced moments, and those who experience them, isolated.

Similarly, the transition into menopause is often confining and shrouded in layers of stereotypes involving hot flashes and sexless love lives. And for Black, queer, trans or incarcerated bodies, the shame and isolation is often deeper. 

Since 2019, the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause (BGG2SM) based in Durham, N.C., has worked to disrupt the predominantly white, cisgender, heterosexual menopausal landscape through the distribution of podcasts, social media engagement, writings and online resources rooted in reproductive justice, Black feminism, and healing justice. Equally central to the organization’s mission is a commitment to engaging marginalized communities in person.

From Harlem to Toronto to the U.K., BGG2SM has hosted intergenerational gatherings, programs, workshops and more, constructing in contrast to a singular landscape: a menopausal multiverse. An expanse that moves across physical, digital and spiritual terrain. 

We become third places because we return to ourselves as we return to each other.

In October 2025, BGG2SM hosted the first-ever menopause conference for the Global Majority. The event, titled Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀ (which translates to “Remembering Blood” in Yoruba), brought together 45 speakers and 250 attendees from 25 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Canada. The conference aimed to address the often-neglected, disorienting and body-altering experiences of menopause. Over the course of the conference, which featured interactive panel discussions on indigenous reproductive practices, the voices of incarcerated people, herbal support and naturopathic care, pleasure, queer inclusion and more, a seismic, geographical transformation seemed to take place.

While all attendees were consciously aware of their coordinates and the address they’d plugged into their GPS to arrange their arrival, what if it was determined that there was another site being formed in the very place they stood? One created strictly by the bodies gathered. Inside of the grand ballroom of the Aria Center, an event venue situated within the city and state of Durham, N.C., on the southeastern coast of North America, I propose that the participants themselves constituted a marked place, nested within a Matryoshka doll of locations within locations. 

So, what makes a place a place? If Black women, trans folks and gender nonconforming people are physical beings (though rendered nonhuman within Sylvia Wynter’s critique of “Man,”) made of the same chemical elements as the earth itself—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium—then where does place reside if not within and/or amongst us?

Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀ and the rhythm of the individuals that made it possible, gathered over a series of days, forming temporal, embodied geographies. Each attendee arriving as an island, and morphing into an archipelago of geosomatic marronage upon their activation within the collective. 

If, as French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebreve argues, space is socially produced, then there is room for its extension to claim that gatherings like Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀ don’t simply emerge as a passive production of place, but as a place itself. Michelle Lanier offers Black Womanist Cartography as a framework through which this becomes legible. As a refusal of borders, colonial conquest and lines drawn through rivers, lakes and the very clay we’re composed of, place, here, is metabolized rather than mapped. 

The disappearance of third places may feel unnerving, but more frightening still is the reality of being unsafe with or without walls. In the age of ICE, mass deportations, the dismantling of reproductive freedom and increased surveillance, we need to remind ourselves that protection cannot be built or assumed by architecture or land mass alone. Instead, it lies within the people we share our time and space, and resources with, whether or not there is surrounding terrain we can lay claim to long enough to plant a flag.

To mark territory as a Black feminist is to build community. And for this, nothing more is required than our bodies, our breath and the circuitous flow of our blood. We become third places because we return to ourselves as we return to each other.