WandaVision: A feminist reading of WandaVision: Motherhood, madness and embodied hexing Megan Jean Harlow WandaVision: Embodied hexing This paper examines representations of maternal embodiment and trauma as the monstrous body of a mother concerning the externalization in the form of a hexagon of the forgotten body in “WandaVision,” a television series produced by Marvel and Disney+. This paper analyzes this hexagon through a neo-materialist semiology of feminist and media theory and argues that hexagons represent the crystallization of feminist identity as embodied time in specific spatial formations. This hexagon form not only communicates the crystallization of Wanda’s control over her idealized town and its inhabitants but also discusses the entire Marvel multiverse and its creation of a hex-media sphere that khoratically encloses possibilities of rupture on a larger scale by self-referential behavior. A neo-materialist disability feminist perspective that draws on Deleuze’s conversation on time, it analyzes how Marvel as a media entity operates through the definition of its media topography and feminine identity within the form. Keywords: feminism, Deleuze, Marvel, superhero, birth, madness IntroductionChaos, madness, gender, trauma, and memory entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in its first television production in partnership with Disney+. “WandaVision” (2021) is a television show that is part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Wanda Maximoff, alias Scarlet Witch, was introduced in issue no. 4 of the comic book “X-Men” in March 1964. Scarlet Witch is unique to the Marvel world because she embodies a non-token female character. “WandaVision” has been proclaimed a marketing and cultural success in its appeal to LGBTQ audiences and its examination of depression (Vazquez 2022). The show allows for an extended serialization of Wanda’s narrative, which explores her character differently than a two-hour blockbuster film. The oscillating mediation between Wanda as the creator of the world within the Westview Hex and Wanda as a victim of her magic and inner chaos is a mediation on the possibilities of agency within a saturated media world. As Marvel expands its reach, this paper does not suggest that the liberatory feminist disruptions within the television show do not risk being co-opted to further capitalism. It instead looks for spaces of resistance and agency within media creation and representation that operate in the framework of “convergence culture” in which audiences and viewers participate in “an elaborate feedback loop between the emerging ‘DIY’ aesethetics of participatory culture and the mainstream industry.” (Jenkins 2004, p. 806). These spaces of resistance and escape are analyzed in this study. In black and whiteThe television series, arranged chronologically through the assemblage of the show’s visual and aural image fragments, begins when Wanda finds Vision’s lifeless body in the S.W.O.R.D. laboratory; she wants to give him a proper funeral. She tries to feel him psychically and realizes he is no longer there. Overcome with grief, she visits the town of Westview, where they had bought a plot of land to build their dream home. At that moment, the embodiment of her trauma and grief shatters her self-control and exceeds the limits of her body. Her chaos magic creates a “hex,” a force field in the form of a hexagon. This paper analyzes this hexagon through a neo-materialist semiology of feminist and media theory and argues that hexagons represent the crystallization of feminist identity as embodied time in specific spatial formations. This hexagon form not only communicates the crystallization of Wanda’s control over her idealized town and its inhabitants but also discusses the entire Marvel multiverse and its creation of a hex-media sphere that khoratically encloses possibilities of rupture on a larger scale by self-referential behavior. I draw on khora from Soderback’s analysis, “differently, it is revolutionary. It moreover challenges and reformulates what we thought of as maternal in the first place—allowing us to rethink not only our relationship to our mothers, but also to time and space as intrinsically inseparable. What comes to bind word and flesh—just as chōra in the Timaeus allowed for a passage between concepts and living bodies—is the flash that is time and space at once: revolutionary time.” (2018; location 5474). Examining the spatiality of temporality opens an analysis of how Marvel as a media entity operates through the definition of its media topography and feminine identity within the form. McSweeney writes, “One of the primary criticisms of the superhero film has been its severely limited representation of gender and sexuality.” (2020, p. 56) The female body is not a crystal in the sense of a closed unit or limit; it is defined historically and materially according to its capacity for reproduction and its ties to circular notions of time through reproduction, hysteria, and the wandering womb. Marvel’s hex ruptures its singularity through its transhistorical and audience-focused feedback loop. The possibility of audience co-option into the structures of capitalism operates as a limit to the understanding of Wanda’s witchy feminine embodiment; however, it also makes the use of media to discuss new bodies and desires possible through its excessive oversaturated media “hex.” Neo-materialism’s return to critical theory encourages the return to the body; this is not a return per se but a conjuring of the production of bodies. Such conjuring requires research and offers immense creative potential for methodology, analysis, and creative invention. Neo-materialism’s attention to production, space, time, and agential realism draws us to an analysis of television beyond representational critique. From a post-feminist perspective, comic book scholarship focuses on the critical manner in which female superheroes are sexually objectified and how traditional gender norms are sometimes disrupted through strong women but then reinforced with the superwoman’s sexualization (Cocca 2014). Cocca also identifies a critical facet of the superhero genre—its active audience base that influences via podcasts communicates suggestions to creators and has the power to change how women are portrayed in comics. “This paper highlights the latter and evaluates how “WandaVision” creates new thoughts and ideas about time and space that can break the hex of media as the active agent and the viewer as a passive receiver. Curtis notes that an increase in female comic writers and artists has led to new roles and women’s representation in comics; this is part of third-wave feminism and the influence of intersectionality (2018). Jac Schaeffer, creator and head writer of “WandaVision,” built the character in opposition to a genre where female superheroes are saved by their male counterparts. Instead, Wanda saves herself in the end. This intentional rewriting of the genre speaks to the power of women entering the world of media and rewriting the script. Pagnucci and Romagnoli argue, “This ongoing tension between fans and creators is one of the most interesting aspects of superhero literature" (2013, p. 55). Marvel’s recent television shows challenge what Taylor & Glitsos (2021) call a linear narrative of time within male superhero stories, through its focus on the multiverse, introduced I will argue by Wanda Vision. Maternity and television history reveal important ways in which agency, identity and domestic labour have operated as Humphreys (2015) shows in her postfeminist articulation. In alignment with Humphrey’s approach, I want to further articulate the necessity of what she calls not overly determining postfeminsm (p. 12). My approach complicates a wave-centered approach to feminism, erasing past waves and leading to inter-generational feminist disputes. As Wanda swiftly traverses multiple decades, we observe her as a 1950s feminine mystique, a 1970s maternal feminist, and a 1990s post-structuralist feminist. As per the wave metaphor, feminist mothers of the past follow a chronological order: a straight line into the future. Future feminism destroys the past, akin to how Chronos eats his children. Instead, we argue for a hexing feminism that both crystallizes and realizes that its production is particular to the moment but can be conjured and defused at other times and places. This paper expands on feminist theories that discuss questions of embodiment, temporality, and mediation in the show’s various periods through the broken optics of Barad’s diffraction. This is done to allow for an expression of inter-generational theories, make current feminism an erasure of all pasts, and critically examine history to evaluate potential improvements and build grounds for theories. Dejmanee (2016) writes, “third-wave feminism and post-feminism have relied on the wave to symbolize an erasure of second-wave dominance that seemingly justifies the emergence and superiority of these contemporary feminist movements.” (p. 471). She suggests that by considering feminist waves as diffractive, how contemporary feminist transmedia and transtemporal movements are intertwined with histories of feminist theory and action can be examined. Winch, Littler, and Keller (2016) write about the promises of feminist theory that examine feminist conjunctures and identify the new movements that arise as an escape from the blames of past feminist deficiencies and generational feminist conflict. This method allows a way to discuss the historical specificity wherein different feminisms emerge. Thus, in my analysis of “WandaVision,” I examine the different conjunctures of feminism at work across the episodes of the show. Drawing on Haraway’s neo-materialist methods combined with the work of Barad and Deleuze, the method allows for a defractive reflection on the spatiality of time. For Deleuze, films uniquely provide a forum to discuss time non-chronologically and that we are inside it. Time is the agency and drive of the subject, not a measurement of subjects in space (1989, p. 81). Within the hex—the media as the capital hex, the Marvel hex, and Wanda’s Hex—there is a crystallization of time, wherein both the possibilities and the limits of agency can be observed. In ways parallel to Van Ness’s research, we can observe how “WandaVision” provides a meta-cinematic commentary on feminist and post-human identity and its relationship to television throughout the series (p. 117). Critical to understanding the disruptive force of materiality and feminist theory within the entire meta-narrative of the show, time is the overarching subject wherein the audience and characters must negotiate, and it is the space of the Hex. Through the changing aesthetics of each episode, time is segmented into decades that introduce television history and cultural narratives related to each period. Thus, “WandaVision” becomes an allegorical commentary on the nature of the media within which it exists. Teleagential crystal shattering ceilingsIn the show, time is broadcast through television; the outsiders perceive the interior through the frame of a hexagon that controls Westview via television waves. This hex is a materialization of the crystal image; it is demonstrated as a series of hexagons that are invisible unless touched and which is broadcast via television waves. However, a single viewing does not indicate whether it is live or prerecorded, a show within a show broadcast in a constantly changing format; this highlights the instability of its virtual image against any reality within the Hex. The virtual and the real constantly reflect and juxtapose one another. Deleuze articulates how cinema is a world of its own that can be understood both in terms of its visual data and non-semiotics –a medium of time/space, with the possibility of writing time and challenging chronological or teleological notions that limit creative possibilities. “WandaVision” is a television show that breaks the normative expectations of a plot as being the product of build-up, climax, and denouement. This is done through narrative techniques, a materialization of time within the narrative, and the employment of classic Hollywood conventions such as continuity editing. This disruption of the chronological notion of time surfaces most viscerally, perhaps through variations in the aesthetic, and can be thought of as a maternal aesthetic of interruption. This is ultimately a creative space that demands an understanding of Wanda’s material embodiment as both the character and the Hex. Grief, the realization of agency (or lack of it), and birth are forms of interruption that materialize in the spaces of feminist subjectivity in a particularly maternal manner that returns the discussion to the materiality of feminist time and space. The material power of Wanda in the narrative allows her to physically create a hex over the town of Westview. The Hex is an exteriorization of her borders of power, and within it exists a world she created. She becomes materially involved in the lives of all its citizens and brings to life her dead cyborg lover, Vision. She also gives birth to her twin sons through the creative power of love. Birthing is always excessive; it is the doubling of oneself, and twins are particularly uncanny, as per Freud’s concept of the uncanny. TV and the domestic ideal: Post-Depression politics and TV“WandaVision” continuously challenges our conceptions of normativity. The show’s first episode is titled “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience.” The show’s attention to detail in the recreation of the 1950s aesthetic in detail is complex. The show is filmed in black and white in front of a live audience; even the crew were dressed in time-appropriate costumes. All special effects used within the show employed technology similar to that time. Spigel (1992) notes in her analysis that television in the 1950s used live programming to create the “perfect view.” Television’s use of a live audience ensured that there were possibilities of surprise, as it was in the theaters of the past, and the advent of the live audience was a key method to make the audience feel at home. The show’s opening features the Marvel Studios logo in black and white with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which continues until the final shot, where a 2.40:1 widescreen ratio is used. The typeface of “WandaVision” is inspired by “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” The production team attempted to recreate a ‘50s-era aesthetic via three camera aspects, as was typical of the time, and then shatter it through close-ups in the end. Televisions surfaced within four years in 68 percent of homes in the 1950s (Spigel 1992). This technological innovation moved entertainment from the public space of the cinema into the private space of the living room, which coincided with the suburban movement out of the city in the post-war era. Women left the workforce, and their former identities and television started becoming a social commodity that created feelings of connection across time and space for American suburban households (Spigel 1992). In one scene, Wanda prepares dinner for her husband, his boss, and his wife. She uses her magic powers to quickly create a meal as knives swirl in the air and appliances run on their own. The 1950s housewife portrayed on television echoes Betty Friedan’s criticism of the feminine mystique (1963). The domestic goddess of scientific engineering arrives as a consumer product to make labor easier, while it requires mastery of technological competence. Humphreys writes about 1950s television and the role domestic women played as audiences. Advertising sold a vision of middle-class suburban mothers fulfilled by their household chores, as was part of a post-war narrative that tried to erase women’s former identification as workers in support of the war. Thus, the new woman was written and sold (Humphreys 2014). Wanda’s use of magic in the house in the abovementioned scenes is reminiscent of “supernatural housework” in shows like “Bewitched.” As Humphreys notes, these images allowed women to be perceived as those who could use creativity in their housework; however, it reinforced the norms of women’s domestic role as a caregiver. Magic was a method by which they could attempt to fit into the role of the suburban white female of the era and qualify as normative despite extraordinary differences. In a manner similar to that of Samantha in “Bewitched,” Wanda comments on wanting to be normal in the first episode during a scene in the kitchen before Vision leaves for work. She says that she knows the apron is a bit much but that she was doing her best to blend in. As Vision leaves for work, she reminds him to put on his “face” and disguise his cyborg identity. The show demonstrates how normativity and female identity were created in 1950s television. The focus on domesticity as cultural normativity and its relationship to technology and commodity is indicated by Vision’s role as a cyborg father and through the show’s first commercial. Episode 1 features a commercial for ToastMate 2000, a kitchen appliance that has a lower heating compartment. The commercial begins with a man standing in a kitchen, where a retro clock reads 6 o’clock. Soon after the toaster on the table burns the toast, he teases his wife for using this appliance for cooking bread. He begins to move down towards a new, modern appliance that exceeds the capacities of the previous one. As the stereotypically dressed 1950s housewife stands to the side, he introduces the ToastMate 2000 as the time now reads 12 o’clock. The woman looks into the camera and says, “Say, this machine has some shine.” A red light on the timer, the first use of color in the show, is seen as they toast bread. The commercial ends with a shot of the ToastMate 2000 with the slogan: “Forget the past, this is your future.” This particular instance of commercials used as a break in the narrative demonstrates how the show highlights the nature of time and identity. As Humphreys writes, “advertising and production executives were seeking to appeal to the American homemaker; through the presentation of a particular version of femininity concerning housework, they were seeking to... create her.” (p. 113). To sell televisions as a new household commodity required creating a version of the modern woman that found joy in housework. This was aided by technology in the form of television, appliances, and the entire commodified kitchen industry. Thus, to sell televisions as a cultural replacement to the previous kinship of the urban lifestyle, the home had to be sold. Television was a method of creating a utopian private environment that transformed the public spaces of cinema halls. It turned homes into theaters where one could transport themselves to other places: thus, a realization of 19th-century modern utopian fantasy. Spigel (1992) historicizes the project of technological utopianism that attempted to cleanse undesirable people such as black, LGBTQ, and homeless people from public spaces and made them part of the history of television. As Spigel (1992) writes, “Televisions’ antiseptic spaces were themselves subject to pollution, as new social disease spread through the wires and into the citizens’ houses.” (p. 113). Television became a method of enforcing normative family ideals directly in the formerly private spaces of the home. WandaVision has been well-received by LGBTQ communities, disrupting this normative assumption (Vazquez 2002). The home is the center of every episode—this differentiates the protagonist of “WandaVision” from other superhero females. The series draws on a nostalgic vision of the past. However, the irony unknown to the audiences is that Wanda and Vision are not located temporally in the show's aesthetic within the narrative. They did not time travel, but the audience was unaware. There is no travel narrative; the change is within the moment. The show disrupts Marvel’s typical display of feminine identity as something that exists within a public space; generally, both the female and male superheroes are understood using their relationship in public (Glitsos & Taylor 2021). The home and its domesticity outline the role of normativity and how television produced a new cultural blend of public and private spaces that created normative understandings of family, gender, and identity. The following section will analyze how the show established a normative understanding of identity and then demonstrated Wanda’s agency and creativity through birthing, the relationship between grief and trauma, and exploring her role as a mother. Birth trauma and powerEpisode 3, "Now in Color," opens with a recap and a new introduction for the show that features the 1970s and its shades of beige and pops of color. In his comic publications, Marvel writer Steve Englehart wanted to make Wanda an “assertive character.” The 1980s’ The Vision and the Scarlet Witch depicted Wanda as both a member of the Avengers and having a family with Vision (Holub 2021). The television series expands on the various Wanda writers’ ideas and temporally distinguishes between the eras. The opening is reminiscent of “The Brady Bunch,” a series of hexagons that frame the family members, the same way "The Brandy Bunch” had squares for the entire family. Pugh (2018) writes, “Given the shifting tides of sexuality and feminism during the 1970s, The Brady Bunch’s purported innocence, couched in its genre as a female sitcom with child-friendly storylines, clashed with issues of sexuality and their depiction… [the series] encouraged a kitschy nostalgia for an America that never was yet that holds lasting appeal” (2018, 52). The television show’s unique setting as being so removed from a contemporary culture wherein the Stonewall Riots, new queer movements, and sexual freedom were emergent makes it a particularly unique temporal setting for Wanda’s pregnancy, birthing, and entrance into motherhood. Hairstyles and mustaches, along with Wanda's bellbottoms, highlight the era. The use of costume and set design and changes in the house decor shift the viewer’s attention to the styles of each era. The viewer begins to observe the association of time with spatiality through the changes in each episode’s aesthetics. As revealed by its title, the viewer witnesses in Episode 3 a new world of color. Similarly, Wanda's pregnancy does not follow a natural timeline and occurs in leaps. She goes from discovering her pregnancy to giving birth in less than 24 hours. Her sped-up birthing process causes multiple events where the physical effects on her body lead to disruptions in the spatial effects of Westview. As she sets up her nursery at the beginning of the episode, we face an inter-disruption as Wanda feels the baby’s first kick in her belly. Wanda says it feels like fluttering, after which the butterflies on the baby’s cot mobile start to fly away, and Wanda releases them out the window. The time-image becomes khoratic in its escape through diffraction; as the butterflies embody the escape of subjectivity, a feminist corporeal time-image ruptures the limits of the body. Here we observe the experience of embodied intergenerational memory, not as negativism, but positivism, a metaphoric journey through grief and motherhood. The baby is an artificial creation made by Wanda's grief. She lost Vision’s cyborg body and brought him back to life, but emotionally created a second version of him within the Hex. Her grief is derived from the knowledge that these children are perhaps not real; they are created within the Hex and are pure virtuality or an image of Wanda’s desire for children. The materiality of their appearance complicates her own experiences of pregnancy. First, the joy of feeling the baby’s first kick brings to life the butterflies. Next comes sadness as the butterflies change form and are no longer part of the baby mobile in the room; perhaps, she realizes the instability of her false world. This follows healing by opening the window and freeing the butterflies. In many ways, this scene exemplifies Wanda’s journey. Her grief creates the world she is in and the child that grows in her womb. Her grief has materialized, but the instability of her imagined world causes constant disruptions to the joy she holds on to. The butterflies cannot be contained, disrupting the normative spatial dynamics of reality. In this hyperreal world, Wanda has created within the Hex, nothing stays as it should, just as nothing has stayed stable in her life. The release of the butterflies and her control over the world she has created are metaphors for the relinquishment of control that composes itself throughout the show. Here is a feminist articulation of the duration of motherhood that is embodied by grief and trauma. Later in the episode, when her Braxton Hicks contractions increase, lights flash, the sink runs, and the entire town's electricity goes out. When her water breaks, the sprinklers go off. Her connection to the spatial environment of Westview is embodied–a form of expanded romantic fallacy takes hold of her and the environment. She controls the actions of people in Westview besides the entire space and time within the Hex. Rothman describes how patriarchy, class, and technology create a hegemonic vision of motherhood (1989, p.14). Wanda's pregnancy does not resemble a typical childbirth experience and challenges the traditional link of a woman to her body. Her birthing disrupts biological determinism because she is pregnant with the child of Vision, a robot that is neither human nor alive. The birth is theoretically unlikely, but the doctor’s visit reveals the sexist stereotypes of the time. As he examines Wanda with a stethoscope, he announces that she is four months pregnant, to which Vision shakes his head. The doctor refers to categories of the baby’s fetal growth in terms of the sizes of fruit to "keep it simple for the ladies." The comparison of the size of a fetus to fruit is rhetoric in medicalized pregnancy discourses even today. Wanda has a home birth, with Monica Rambeau’s character serving as the stand-in midwife. Monica is the first female African-American Avenger and the second Captain Marvel. Cocca (2016) outlines the historical significance of the character in Marvel’s comic history; Monica starred in a 1989 comic book where she quotes Audre Lorde. Her two appearances in the comic books are sporadic. However, her appearance in “WandaVision” is incredibly powerful, as her role has been repeatedly ignored in the comic trajectory of “Ms. Marvel.” In “WandaVision,” she assumes her place within a narrative that demonstrates a dynamic, powerful role where Wanda and Monica share a powerful friendship that is not based on their relationship with men. Midway through Episode 4, after a detour into the “outside” world of S.H.I.E.L.D., the viewer returns to the pregnancy scene. Within the Hex, Monica comes to visit Wanda at her house in a comedic scene wherein Wanda loses control of the Hex and constantly switches jackets. She attempts to hide her pregnancy through stop-motion filmography when suddenly she goes into labor. The interruption of the conversation leads to the immediate appearance of Monica to assist with Wanda’s delivery. Vision is absent because he left to find a doctor and has not returned in time for the birth. With the help of Monica, Wanda delivers two healthy babies, by which time Vision returns with the doctor. After the delivery, Monica tells Wanda about Ultron, which refers to reality in the outside world. Takeshita (2017) writes about rare media instances in which the medicalization of birth is challenged. She notes that previous research uniformly agrees that birth representations matter since media representations that enforce the hegemony of the medicalization of birth is crucial because it is the primary manner in which women learn about childbirth (Kline 2007; Lothian and Grauer 2003; Morris and McInerney 2010; Sears and Godderis 2011). Monica’s character thus reveals an entirely non-typical performance of birth on television. Madness and khoratic interruptionsWanda’s pregnancy is monstrous, from the non-normative reproduction of cyborg–witch children to the incredible speed at which her fetus grows. The actual “monster,” however, is her absolute non-belonging in Westview; she appears to displace her body, a cultural body, born of a certain cultural moment, “of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen p. 4). The monster here is born at the inception of Westview; now, the monster breeds and doubles her monstrosity. It can be said that every pregnant body is monstrous in a society unable to honor anything outside the individual self. Disability studies scholar Margrit Shildrick calls this process the “leaky body” assigned as part of the devaluation of disabled bodies and their inability to keep interior flows at bay (Shildrick, 2002). The pregnant body is clearly not one; it takes on the task of the self and that of another, and, in the neo-liberal era of feminism, is faced with a double operation between the “choice” of motherhood and the realities of being entrapped by the body. Between individual choice and the choice to be a mother, the mother is left alone in her chosen destiny. Certainly, the choice is not a reality that is universally placed on the mother; choice becomes another neo-liberal fetish that equals the control and abjection of the mother’s khoratic womb. Vision’s body is white and ghostly, with a giant hole where the Mind Stone once was. The Mind Stone is the source of power by which he was made sentient; it is also the stone that has given Wanda her powers. The idea that there is a stone in one’s mind, which can cause madness, idiocy, or dementia, was a 15th-century medical theory. Although cutting out the stone was not a mainstream treatment then, the lobotomies of the 20th century can arguably be thought of as coming from a similar process of medicalizing psychiatric behavior. The process of cutting out the stone from one’s head is infamous in Bosch’s satirical paintings. Briefly, Wanda sees Vision as he is; the show is interrupted, as is her narrative control, and she must briefly face the fact that Vision is dead. Wanda’s isolation begins here as she realizes her world is unstable, and her role within it isolates her. Thus, she experiences the isolation of mothers throughout modern contemporary society in the following episodes, but she is also uniquely entirely in control of her world to an extent. There is a negotiation of identity between her agency as the creator of the Hex and her responsibility towards her children, husband, and community. She is at odds with the world she created and becomes further isolated by her actions. We witness Wanda’s breakdown as she realizes the instability of her reality, and we observe her powers of control. As a character, she operates within the boundaries of the Hex—wherein she has partial agency and partial responsiveness to media and television history norms—as it relates to society overall. Madness operates as a rhetorical strategy within the news media’s recounting violence as a pathological inevitability of those deemed mentally abnormal. Mad(wo)men are deemed outsiders to society; they do not take their medicine or follow the proper course for a cure. Thus, their deviant identity is on the path toward its inevitable ending. In many ways, reviews of Wanda, her imprisonment, and telling her life story as a narrative in which she is a victim of repeated trauma have the same effect. It creates a story in which Wanda will inevitably become evil. Her actions in Westview are, in fact, only the first part of Marvel’s use of her as an evil character (which was already established in the comic series), and is less positively done in the newest “Dr. Strange” film where she becomes an evil version of herself willing to do anything to get her children back. In the television series, we see the positive ways in which her inner world is a source of power and come to know Wanda on her terms, in her imagined home(s), where she refigures her trauma to create new worlds. While the actions on the townspeople are violent, her mind control forces them to live inside her world; we come to observe and understand the embodied characteristics of her inner world without pathologizing her. Jones (2022) writes in an analysis of the role of emotions in Family Therapy that the expansion of female characters has been suppressed within Marvel due to the idea that women’s emotional excess does not make them good candidates for a primary role. “WandaVision’s” use of the emotions of women’s well-founded sites of grief allows its protagonist to create worlds that do not exist and reasserts a typically stereotyped female character as a dominant source of power. Jones (2022) writes, “Her emotions serve her and her alone.” While this paper agrees that the show expands previous narratives within Wanda’s world, her emotions are tied to her relationality; the inner turmoil that leads to such an expanded embodiment of the hexagon is created through her connection to her children, husband, and past. “WandaVision” powerfully rewrites images of femininity that consigned women in the 1950s to the identity of a domestic, suburban white woman. This cultural norm is challenged by honoring Wanda’s unique emotional interior and through how the show materializes grief and emotion as power. In line with our diffracted view of feminist waves, this paper notes the power of feminist critiques, which laid the ground for new articulations of the exclusions within feminists’ identification. At the same time as “The Brady Bunch,” feminist authors were calling for new forms of writing the body; the écriture femininé French theorists articulated a psychoanalytic feminist critique of the excluded female figure. In another vein, black feminists and native feminists were writing themselves to paper. The reproductive justice movement aided the acquirement of legal rights and political focus for multiple feminisms to flourish and collectively and heterogeneously discover a difference within their movements. The power of the transformation from Friedan to de Beauvoir was conjuring the non-stability of the dominant discourse. If a woman was bad, she need never be good; she could be Medusa, the abject, the rejected. This identification with alterity is part of the crux of post-structuralism turning away from essentialism toward a world of linguistic ordering where gender becomes socially constructed, as in the work of Judith Butler. At the same time, intersectional feminists such as Crenshaw identified the multiple intersecting modalities of power that unevenly affect different people at different places and times; race, gender, and class are not overarching themes but must be analyzed in their particularity. We find Marxism and psychoanalytic post-Lacanianism interweaved throughout the threads of the other variants. Noteworthily, there is no “final feminism.” Post-feminism may attempt to say we now dissect feminism itself, which is certainly a path taken by some; however, it is important that there is no end to the process of inquiry and memory and that feminism itself has always been a process of remembering, rewriting, and rebirthing. The hidden spaces of history, the powerful memories of grandmothers, mothers, historical trauma, and beauty. Audre Lorde’s embodied erotic memory. The crystal image khoratically shatters in the memory–in its reflection, its power it brings to light its coal. My so-called breakdownEpisode 7 is set in the 1990s and features the reality television style of the chaotic nature of real life. Hand-held cameras and indie rock music are used in the introduction. There are more direct video conversations between the characters. It is Halloween in Westview, and Pietro is the fun uncle who hangs out with the kids and sleeps on the couch all day. The dynamic of the family has changed in the 1990s, and the viewer is shown a rawer version of the idyllic family, more in the style of “Roseanne” (1988-2018) than “Leave it to Beaver” (1957-1963). Her brother’s presence introduces more of Wanda's past and heritage. Wanda and Vision are now dressed in traditional comic-book-style costumes, which indicates to the viewer that there are more interruptions within the 1990s generation of collective identification that demanded specificity to race and class. Not every woman is the same, and differences matter. This interrupted line of feminist articulation provided depth and rigor to a movement not limited to the confines of the small scholarly analysis it is given. Communities of activists in various forms of resistance in the face of contested power have worked against dominant power structures. Roy Thomas created a group of female superheroes to make fun of second-wave feminism; in the story’s last line, Hank Pym says that women’s lib is a lost cause, and Wanda responds, saying that if sexism continues, then the Lady Liberators may rise again. This is an example of how Wanda has continued to play a part in the characterization of feminism and how feminism operates as a field that interweaves within the show. The history of black feminism and native feminism did not start anew in the “second wave.” Rather, its force is embodied in the cultural milieu of the time; this should not freeze its agency and power but rather multiply our demand to examine the spaces and projects in which it was always already at work. To expose the instances in history and other spaces where different women worked within their historical context to bring their work to life has been the project of many feminists. At the same time, post-structuralist feminism and queer theory were popularized in prominent works such as Butler’s Gender Trouble. Butler takes a post-structuralist approach to witness society through a structuralist lens; this allows us to break that lens. Gender becomes a performance of the structures of man/woman and the process of deconstructing what each term signifies, such as a woman being relegated to being the white hetero-normative woman in earlier feminist texts. Later, a critical interruption of the narrative within the show occurs with a commercial. The commercial featured in Episode 7 starts with a woman sitting on a bench in a park. The sky is turning gray, and the scene shifts to a woman falling into a bed. The commercial is for an anti-depressant, Nexus. The commercial narrators state that the medicine will anchor one back to reality or the reality of their choice. It parodies the warnings for depression products in commercials and states that one might end up with more depression and that one should not take Nexus unless their doctor has cleared them to move on with their truth “because the world doesn’t revolve around you, or does it?” This commercial and the focus on depression is the first time the MCU and the larger Marvel comic genre have dealt with mental illness in a way that treats the subject seriously and provides a complex image without the villainization of the character. Wanda, as a character, provides an alternative to the discourse surrounding madness and emotion and their relationship with women. According to Herson (2016), “Madness is not an objectively defined, solvable medical problem, but a material experience that is defined and disciplined through cultural discourses of normative, gendered behavior.” Postpartum disorders disrupt hegemonic discourses surrounding “good” motherhood; they are domesticated, medicalized, and considered temporary diseases that must be treated to restore a mother to her original state, as Dubriwny (2010) argues. Grief is expressed as madness in the form of embodied control—it is externalized through a spatial construction that creates her visible inner world, which, while existing in the present, can only be viewed or demonstrated as a historically mediated form. This complex layering of embodied emotion, power, and time provides room to explore the dynamics of representation beyond an opaque reading. Through an analysis of how grief is a component of feminine subjectivity that is in itself a disjunctive notion of time, grief is found to be the disruption of life in response to death or other traumas that are pauses in the normal flow of life. Grief can be both pain and a powerful source of creativity. Similarly, “madness” or “trauma” can serve as the place of grief in the interruption of time. As Baraitser unravels in her phenological encounter with maternal subjectivity, the mother comes to be through interruptions in time (2009). Her conclusion of the event of birth in Badiou’s terms and her interdisciplinary analysis makes a crucial intervention into the understanding of motherhood. Reliance on Badiou’s event stresses a truth or oneness with an event that ultimately relies on Heideggerian clearing, wiping away the mess. Mitchell and Snyder articulate a more positive ethical orientation in their politics of atypicality that embraces a neo-materialistic approach. The argument is that disability studies should advocate for a collectivity that allows for the mess, embraces it, and does not look for some utopian future but attends to the material complexities of now. Baraister’s work articulates an inter-subjective and trans-subjective understanding of agential realism and promisingly notes the necessity of revisiting the maternal body as a disabled body. She conjures Kristeva’s “herethics,” the embodiment of the semiotic split that exceeds language through materialization the maternal body serves, as that which exceeds the individual. (pp.100-103). I believe this turn in argumentation is relevant to a neo-materialist examination of embodied maternal expression. If we can perceive the pregnant woman as one who exceeds what she signifies, the pregnant woman in cinema may be Deleuze’s crystal-image, exceeding the time frame. The place of anticipation, the interruption in individuality, provides a khoratic space, which may draw us into the murky territory of essentialism. However, the problem returns to the idea of the event of birth and other multiple events, those without grounds that require an entirely new ontology that denies how maternity is embodied memory; it is cultural and the ultimate continuation that does not need a fresh slate. Maternity is the messy floors of midwives and the blood that soaks the ground beneath our feet. Here, we break the crystal-image of temporal order into the khoratic visions of our embodied remembrance. Thus, Deleuze’s crystal-image in the film is khoratically personified in the female embodiment of temporal disjuncture. “WandaVision” illustrates how the media can represent the instability of time as it relates to the identity of Wanda, her grief for and the loss of Vision, and how spatial and temporal elements influence each other. ConclusionThe hexagon encompasses the fictional town of Westview, New Jersey, where Wanda controls the townspeople and creates a perfect place. She controls the entire town and realizes over time that she has created such a place with chaos magic. She begins to realize what she has done: she has turned Westview into a space/time image of her embodied self. The chaos power’s release can be considered the embodied memory released through the trauma of seeing Vision’s dead body. Finally, she realizes what she has done, and to free Westview’s inhabitants, she frees the town, which then causes the death of her children who are born in the show and the death of Vision, or of her memory of him. The episodes are divided into eight decades that begin in the 1950s. The show changes its introductory scenes, costumes, style, and filming to create each episode with its aesthetic. Each episode contains historically specific moments that identify generational feminism through feminist diffraction of embodied historicity. A neo-materialist agential focus that Barad (2007) articulates attends to how there is never an object as such. The viewer and the viewed perceive the object, the intra-action of objects, and their viewers and creators all formed tangled webs of meaning and agential reactions. Such a reading can allow for new conceptions of media studies that move beyond representational critique that carries the risk of negativism in post-structuralist critique. Ethics leaves those involved in the complex negotiations between power and agency and those who do not have a choice to be essentially written out of the story, which leads to a very difficult collective movement. Organization for the sake of those who have no future and wish not to denies the material reality of the histories of women and men who have resisted within systems of oppression. It is not black and white, but many shades of grey. This paper uses Haraway’s method of diffraction to study television; diffraction allows us to examine “the interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies” (Haraway 1997 @mosue., p. 16). The paper uses the concept of Deleuze’s theory of the crystal image to interrogate the relationships of time and space in “WandaVision” and argue for a khoratic crystal-image. Thus, Deleuze’s crystal-image in the film is khoratically personified in the female embodiment of temporal disjuncture. “WandaVision” demonstrates how the media can represent the instability of time as it relates to the identity of Wanda. This is externalized in the hexagon as an embodiment of the rhetorical power of madness derived from her grief for the loss of Vision and creatively birthed by her virtual twin children and how spatial and temporal elements influence each other. ReferencesBarad, Karen. 2007. 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