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ABSTRACT
The Marvel TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is set in a fictional American intelligence agency, reproduces contemporary media, academic, and governmental discourse surrounding violent radicalization and its causes. Furthermore, it replicates a number of stereotypes that are specific to women who participate in terrorism, portraying them as victims and/or as the types of clichéd figures that Sjoberg and Gentry have named ‘mothers’, ‘monsters’, and ‘whores’. This article illustrates these points mainly through a comparison of the narratives of two characters with similar backgrounds, one female, Daisy Johnson, and one male, Grant Ward, who each become involved with a series of violent groups. While Ward’s trajectory is one of gradually gaining power, Daisy remains framed as both a follower and a victim. Although the series does make some gestures towards undermining Manichean post-9/11 discourse about terrorism – through slippages both between Daisy, one of the show’s heroines, and Ward, a key antagonist, and between the eponymous intelligence agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., and the terrorist organization Hydra – these are ultimately disavowed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For instance, the academic journal previously known as Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association was recently renamed Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+.
2. Also known as Islamic State, ISIS, and Daesh, ISIL was formed in 2013, coincidentally the year AoS premiered, through the merging of two existing jihadi organisations.
3. As mentioned above, Daisy and Ward are by no means the only characters within the MCU and the oeuvre of Joss Whedon and his collaborators to be brainwashed/indoctrinated, often in such a way as to make them commit violence. While it is beyond the scope of the present article to do so, it might well be instructive to compare other pairs of male and female ‘radicalized’ characters – for example, James ‘Bucky’ Barnes and Natasha ‘Black Widow’ Romanoff, who were both transformed into elite assassins as part of secret Soviet programmes – to see whether similar gendered differences emerge. Certainly, Whedon received substantial criticism for a scene in the MCU film Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015), which he wrote and directed, in which Natasha refers to herself as a ‘monster’ because she was sterilised as part of her training/brainwashing. Many critics saw this scene as ‘reinforcing the heteronormative notion that women’s bodies are biologically suited for reproduction and that being unable to fulfil this capacity is monstrous’ (Randell-Moon Citation2019, 104). We shall return to the tendency for violent women to be portrayed by the media as ‘monstrous’ below.
4. There are other, more minor, characters in AoS who, it is suggested, were likewise drawn into Hydra due to childhood trauma and/or neglect. One example is Sunil Bakshi (Simon Kassianides), whose background is summarised by another character thus: ‘Grew up on the streets … Parents weren’t around, got into petty crime … His borderline personality disorder makes him over-value certain relationships – thank Mom and Dad for that – and one glimmer of belief in an authority figure like [Hydra commander] Whitehall, well: “Hail Hydra”’ (‘The Things We Bury’).
5. Many of these observations are not only true of media depictions of female terrorists but of women who engage in other kinds of criminal and/or violent behaviour as well. As Easteal et al. summarise, women who break the law, especially women who kill, are seen as ‘“doubly deviant” … because they breach general social expectations as well as transgress appropriate feminine behaviour’ (Citation2015, 1).
6. Samira Shirish Nadkarni reads S.H.I.E.L.D.’s defeat of the Afterlife Inhuman community as an American fantasy of the destruction of an inherently treacherous ‘communist Asian country (i.e. China)’ that ‘exist[ed] outside of the structures of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s “consensual” empire’ (Citation2018, 225).
7. There is a partial redemption for Jiaying in season seven when the S.H.I.E.L.D. team re-encounter her while time-travelling to the early 1980s. After learning that Daisy is her daughter, Jiaying dies trying to protect her from an assailant (‘Stolen’). However, since this encounter takes place ‘before’ her dismemberment by Hydra (and, in fact, in an alternate timeline – hence why her death does not result in Daisy’s ceasing to exist), it does not disrupt the ‘mother’ narrative whereby Jiaying’s traumatic experiences turn her from a loving parent into a vengeful ‘monster’.
8. As Stephen Beale has pointed out, these two episodes are full of religious imagery and references. In ‘Absolution’, Daisy describes Hive as ‘the devil’, while Lincoln is given Christ-like connotations when he sacrifices his own life to kill Hive by exploding a plane with both of them on board in ‘Ascension’, letting go of a crucifix necklace just before the explosion. ‘He’s paying for all our mistakes’, comments Coulson. Of course, this plot development only reinforces the construction of Lincoln as one of the many ‘white saviors’ in Joss Whedon’s work (Iatropoulos Citation2018), protecting a non-white woman from harm.
9. As Bronwen Calvert points out, the Framework storyline in season four, mentioned above, helps to ‘highlight … the … slippage between S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra’ (Citation2019, 24).
10. AoS has, however, featured a large number of powerful female villains, including Jiaying, A.I.D.A. (Mallory Jansen) (season four), Brigadier General Hale (Catherine Dent) (season five), Izel (Karolina Wydra) (season six), and Sibyl (Tamara Taylor) (season seven). As Bronwen Calvert notes in her discussion of A.I.D.A., such female villains are often fan favourites due to their ‘boldness, drive and power’ (Citation2019, 20). However, of course, traditional TV narrative logic dictates that, at the end of the relevant season, each of them ‘must be defeated so that the world-order of S.H.I.E.L.D. can be maintained’ (Citation2019, 24).
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Notes on contributors
Eve Bennett
Eve Bennett is a member of the Institut de Recherche Médias, Cultures, Communication et Numérique at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. Her research mainly focuses on representations of gender in science fiction television series. She is the author of a monograph, Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV: Representations of Masculinity and Femininity at the End of the World (Bloomsbury, 2019), and has published in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Television and Science Fiction Film and Television.