Relativizzare il corpo: il "caso Bernaroli" nella giurisprudenza italiana

The article will be focusing on the complexity that characterizes the body in the contemporary era. A complexity mostly linked to the development of new surgical technologies that can operate on it with the purpose of changing its anatomical sex. What it will be highlighted is how the body no longer falls within the incontrovertible regime of nature but, on the contrary, as the very notion of naturalness reveals its own semiotic constitution. Through the contradiction put in place by the transsexual subject, we will be able to specifically problematize the category of "sexuality", highlighting how this is the place for semantic negotiations which, evolving over time, do not reduce the subject to the "man-woman" binary ". Introducing the story of Alessandra Bernaroli, a transsexual woman who, after the transition, saw her marriage dissolve, this work will aim to underline the inadequacy of Italian jurisprudence which fails to account for the contradictory nature of the story. The Italian laws, in fact, postulate the “heteronormative paradigm” as a binding semantic schematism that can hardly be questioned. On the contrary, here, through the integration of a semiotic epistemology with reflections coming from gender studies, the foundations will be laid for a paradigm shift of law that is able to account for this complexity.