Narrative Touchstones of the Storied Perimenopausal Health Identity

Abstract

Whilst information about women’s health saturates society through various representations (Lyons, 2000), the effect that these representations have on the formation of women’s health identity construction remains largely unreported by the voices of the women themselves. This is reflected in the following question used to investigate this issue:

What health considerations have perimenopausal women undergone in lived experience and how have they used these to construct a health identity?

The aim of this study was to address this and investigate these health considerations by re-presenting the individual health experiences of women using the narratives of perimenopausal women from Oldham, a deprived community in Northern England. The following narratives will help to understand how lived experience contributes to considerations of health and how these help to construct health identity, in addition to what these health considerations mean to the women who took part in the study. In order to address these issues the women’s accounts were deconstructed in terms of personal, interpersonal, ideological, and positional aspects of health identity (Murray, 2000). This allowed illustration the self-evaluation and monitoring of personal health in order to emphasise the way the participants construct their personal health identity through the plot of the account.