”Jag hoppas få vara er livmoder” : En multimodal analys av surrogatmödraskap i scener ur The Handmaid’s tale och Vänner

Sammanfattning: Title: “I hope to be your uterus” - A multimodal analysis on surrogacy in scenes from The Handmaid’s tale and Friends Surrogacy is a widely discussed subject both internationally and in Sweden. The opinions on whether it should be legalized or not differ from country to country, which is reflected in how they implement their different laws on the subject. The main issues in the debates about surrogacy is whether a legalization of altruistic surrogacy would lead to safe methods within the medical care and stop the expansion of illegal markets or if there’s risks of opening the doors to a bigger commercial market. Parallel to the political discussion and opinions on the subject, the portrayal of surrogacy has appeared within popular culture, as in TV-series, for a period of time. It can be found in different genres like drama and comedy since the 90s, which makes the subject interesting to observe. The purpose of this essay is to study how the topic of surrogacy is portrayed in two different genres in the TV-series Friends and The Handmaid’s tale. For this purpose we use multimodal analysis to answer if there are similarities and/or differences in the portrayal of surrogacy within our research material. The theoretical framework is based on Richard Dyers theories on stereotypes, Carol Patemans ideas of ‘the sexual contract’ and Brooke Weihe Edges studies on the representation of women in different movie genres amongst others. Our study shows that even if the genres vary there are stereotypical structures in how both infertile women and surrogate mothers are presented to the audience.