Complicated Girls Suck: A Feminist Autoethnography of Media and Outlaw Emotions at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

The author employs feminist autoethnography and uses decades of personal journals to track her own development as a “complicated girl” in the 1990s and 2000s alongside representations of complicated women in media, pop culture, and literature. The autoethnography employs feminist theory, specifically ideas about outlaw emotions that reside outside dominant values and can be harnessed as feminist emotions. The analysis uncovers the persistent dichotomies around women in general, and those dubbed “complicated girls,” specifically: nature vs culture, body vs mind, and emotion vs reason. By acknowledging the importance of being “both/and” as opposed to “either/or,” women can challenge media representations that oversimplify them and deem their outlaw emotions unacceptable.