saint_eleanor's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

5.0

So lovely and beautiful, i love women

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meganpbell's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.5

This intense, experimental history weaves together biography, archival record, period photographs, and a kind of radical act of imagination to tell the stories of Black and queer women in Philadelphia and NYC at the turn of the century—their experiments in love, living, sex, family, gender, autonomy, and more—all while under severe legal, societal, and police oppression. This is a challenging read—it’s easy to get lost, but it’s a worthwhile part of being “wayward.”

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cassandrapaige's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.0


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antonique_reads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

5.0


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laurareads87's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Absolutely incredible -- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is absolutely one of the best books rooted in archival research that I've ever read.  In recognizing "the revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives" [xv] Hartman works with the goal of learning from Black women who experimented with new ways of living and community-building and connecting that resisted the racist and patriarchal criminalization, pathologization, and violence surrounding them.  The argument: that "young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise" [xv].  In working with fragments - arrest records, photos, case files - Hartman speculates on what has been lost, what these women might've been thinking and feeling, the text "marked by the errantry that it describes" [xiv].  Highly, highly recommend.

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mcmorgan's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.0


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