Feminised grief and the politics of televisual displacement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

The post‑Endgame era marks a decisive transformation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) treatment of trauma and grief. Earlier phases of the franchise largely coded emotional response along gendered lines i.e., male characters tended to internalise loss within the confines of a single film arc, translating it into acts of violent vengeance or redemptive self‑sacrifice rather than sustained psychological reflection. By Phase 4, however, the MCU relocated its most complex and protracted engagements with trauma and grief to female-led Disney+ television series including WandaVision (2021), Hawkeye (2021), Ms. Marvel (2022), Echo (2024), and Ironheart (2025). This shift in medium appears intentional: with lower financial stakes and a serial format, television offers Marvel a space for representational experimentation — precisely where stories centred on women are often structurally relegated when deemed too risky for blockbuster cinema.. Thus, the MCU's organisation of grief across platforms reflects the gendered labour politics of franchise filmmaking and reproduces a long-standing cultural division in which cinema has historically been aligned with masculine-coded heroism and action, while television — serial, intimate, domestic — becomes the feminised site where emotional excess can be safely contained. Female grief is granted visibility in the MCU only insofar as it is displaced onto a platform historically associated with feminised spectatorship and lower commercial risk.

This chapter argues that, in the aftermath of Avengers: Endgame, the MCU constructs a gendered economy of grief reinforced through the differential deployment of cinematic and televisual space. In this bifurcated landscape, female characters such as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Kate Bishop/Hawkeye (Hailee Steinfeld), Maya Lopez/Echo (Alaqua Cox), and Riri Williams/Ironheart (Dominique Thorne) are permitted to inhabit forms of protracted grief, melancholia, and traumatic repetition within the televisual sphere, while theatrical releases typically naturalise male loss as a catalyst for violence, redemption, and narrative resolution. The MCU, this chapter contends, does not simply reflect cultural attitudes toward gendered emotion — it actively reproduces and institutionalises them through the architecture of its own distribution.