A visual semiotic analysis of sperm donors’ baby photos as major marketing material at thes[u]permarket

Abstract

This article presents a semiotic visual analysis of 48 sperm donors’ baby photos from six of the largest American sperm banks, using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s method of ‘reading images’ described in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006). Donor baby photos, conceptualized as self-advertisements, serve to engage prospective sperm users because of their liminal nature. The following issues are addressed: How do sperm donors use baby photos to transmit messages to prospective recipients? What are the cultural values conveyed via the photos? Is there a correspondence between donors’ verbal narratives and meanings encoded in baby photos? Furthermore, a new category of ‘chosen/selected’ images is proposed for classifying photos that were neither made for the purpose of the study nor found by the researcher. The photo selection is strategic and serves to engage sperm recipients in imaginary relations with donors. Furthermore, subversive messages tacitly transmitted in baby photos desemiotize some of the stated values in the verbal narratives.

Soldiers and superheroes needed! Masculine archetypes and constrained bodily commodification in the sperm donation market

“…To summarize, much of the literature focuses on unconstrained bodily commodification contexts, where the process of sperm donation belongs to a system of free-market economic exchange (Almeling, 2007, 2009; Bokek-Cohen, 2015; Kroløkke, 2009; Moore and Schmidt, 1999). Sperm donors are thus motivated by both financial incentives and the idea of altruism (Bokek-Cohen and Ravitsky, 2017). Yet, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, sperm donation is highly regulated with regard to donor compensation, donor anonymity and sperm import and export, which carry implications for the supply and demand of sperm and, consequently, for the growth of the market and the processes of sperm commodification and value creation.…”

Danmu video as the resemiotised: An attitudinal analysis of Home Visit

“…First, it is not possible to separate the original video from the danmu video, as the former is necessarily embedded in the latter. This is different from the resemiotisations examined so far: in previously examined resemiotisations, each stage of meaning making is separated from another, and it is relatively clear when a given stage starts and ends, whether it is from face-to-face communication to written text (Iedema, 2001), from written text to images (Bokek-Cohen, 2017) or audio-visual artefacts (Cimasko and Shin, 2017; Ravelli et al, 2013), or from live performance to film operas (Sindoni and Rossi, 2016). In contrast, the danmu video exists as a parasite of the original video, which means that the meanings resemiotised via danmu must have the original video serving as the backdrop.…”