“Riot Women”

As two (peri)menopausal teacher educators wired in punk rock ways, we embarked upon a self-study to investigate not only how (peri)menopause had impacted our lives and work, but also what being in the third act of our careers had attuned us to and what we resisted. We were inspired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) series “Riot Women”, and like the characters in the series, chose to unleash our resistance to perceptions of women academics/teacher educators (and to the patriarchy in academe) by (re)writing the lyrics to a punk rock song. The lyrics were generated from phrases in six transcripts of recorded conversations that were transcribed and analyzed as part of the self-study we conducted. Using a posthuman feminist lens, we explored the ways in which we coped with (peri)menopausal symptoms; the ways we resisted perceptions of older women, teacher educators, and women academics; and the ways in which we rejected the expectations of women in teacher education/academe. Through acts of agency, we learned to accept our unruly bodies, becoming a little stronger, a little angrier, and a lot more punk rock.