Where's Wanda? Collage and Collapse

WandaVision encapsulates genre hybridity and multiverse of madness within a sitcom conceit. The attempt to avoid grief at her lost love, Vision, by reconstructing his image, is manifested in a deployment of the US sitcom framework. The show plays out versions of the ideal heteronormative couple and ensuing nuclear family. For Mary Beth Haralovich, in a post-war society, the middle-class homemaker was an important basis of this social economy—so much so that it was necessary to define her in contradictions which held her in a limited social place. … the housewife “was promised psychic and social satisfaction for being contained within the private space of the home.” This promised life is what Wanda is trying to establish for herself, yet it is not without her exploitation of others and is, ultimately, contradictory and unsustainable. This chapter explores these contradictions through collage art.