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Suburban Superheroes: Utopia and Trauma in WandaVision

Full citation

Jack Black (2021). ‘Suburban Superheroes: Utopia and Trauma in WandaVision’. Critical Studies in Television Online, 26 February.

This essay reads WandaVision’s shifting sitcom suburb as a setting through which Wanda attempts to manage bereavement and trauma. The town’s familiar domestic forms promise stability, yet its residents remain trapped within a world she cannot fully control. Bringing psychoanalytic accounts of utopia and enjoyment to the series, the piece considers how the imagined safety of suburbia conceals its own violence and contradictions.