Risking the Personal: Academic Friendship, Feminist Role Models and Katherine Mansfield

Author(s)
Mayhew, Louise R
Rydstrand, Helen
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2019
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This article celebrates friendship as a valid starting point for scholarly enquiry and uses conversation as a valuable methodology. While completing their doctoral research on modernist short stories and women’s art collectives, co-authors Rydstrand and Mayhew discovered New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield was a contact point between their respective projects. Around 1981, Harridan Screenprinters quoted Mansfield’s injunction to ‘Risk anything’ on a poster, invoking Mansfield as a role model—as a leading modernist author and as a risk-taker. Mayhew later gave Rydstrand a copy of the poster as a thesis submission gift. ...
View more >This article celebrates friendship as a valid starting point for scholarly enquiry and uses conversation as a valuable methodology. While completing their doctoral research on modernist short stories and women’s art collectives, co-authors Rydstrand and Mayhew discovered New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield was a contact point between their respective projects. Around 1981, Harridan Screenprinters quoted Mansfield’s injunction to ‘Risk anything’ on a poster, invoking Mansfield as a role model—as a leading modernist author and as a risk-taker. Mayhew later gave Rydstrand a copy of the poster as a thesis submission gift. This article explores interrelations between personal, creative and professional risks, from Mansfield’s avant-garde milieu of the early twentieth century, to the dynamic scene of second-wave feminism in Australia, and finally to the precarious world of the twenty-first century academy, all brought together by the physical artefact of the Mansfield poster. In this threefold engagement, we counter the presumed masculinity of experiment and champion feminine forms of risk.
View less >
View more >This article celebrates friendship as a valid starting point for scholarly enquiry and uses conversation as a valuable methodology. While completing their doctoral research on modernist short stories and women’s art collectives, co-authors Rydstrand and Mayhew discovered New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield was a contact point between their respective projects. Around 1981, Harridan Screenprinters quoted Mansfield’s injunction to ‘Risk anything’ on a poster, invoking Mansfield as a role model—as a leading modernist author and as a risk-taker. Mayhew later gave Rydstrand a copy of the poster as a thesis submission gift. This article explores interrelations between personal, creative and professional risks, from Mansfield’s avant-garde milieu of the early twentieth century, to the dynamic scene of second-wave feminism in Australia, and finally to the precarious world of the twenty-first century academy, all brought together by the physical artefact of the Mansfield poster. In this threefold engagement, we counter the presumed masculinity of experiment and champion feminine forms of risk.
View less >
Journal Title
Australian Feminist Studies
Volume
34
Issue
101
Subject
Human society
Language, communication and culture
Cultural studies
History, heritage and archaeology
Social Sciences
Women's Studies
Modernism
feminism
resistance