Tracey Emin turned her messy life into radical art

The furious reaction to “My Bed” would recur in the coming decades in response to any number of things done by young women: blogging, activism, making music, dancing, writing for TV. Male antiheroes dominated prestige-cable dramas, outsized and magnetic; their dubious morality and unreliable narration made them figures of fascination, if not outright envy. But as women characters likewise grew weirder, messier and less likable, their very existence was treated as an existential threat: How could women continue to clean up messes if they were the ones making them?

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“Previously, people just thought I was moaning and whining and sulking,” she said. “When actually I was writing about teenage sex, rape, abuse, child abuse, abortion — all issues that women and young girls face.” The themes that people were able to ignore in one woman’s work became more difficult to minimize when they began resonating with a global audience: “People had to come to terms with the fact that I was talking about big subjects.”