“A Bunch of Suburban Bitches”: A Feminist and Cultural Criminological Review of Good Girls

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Media depictions of women committing crime often reflect traditional gender attitudes, norms, and expectations, and cultural criminology suggests that such representations can shape public opinions and understanding of crime and justice. Available depictions of women offenders may be especially salient as these characters are generally less represented in entertainment media, and when they are featured in film and television, they have historically been sensationalized in specific narrative tropes. Utilizing a feminist framework of “doing gender,” this study presents an exploratory analysis of how four primary characters’ experiences with crime are shaped by their gender in the NBC television series Good Girls (2018–2021). The results offer insight into how gender frames offending behaviors, specifically motivations for criminal offending, access to offending opportunities, and reliance on gendered stereotypes to avoid detection, in fictional television programming. The discussion examines how certain social phenomena, such as gendered criminal expectations, are echoed in media.