Famiglie (in)naturali. Ideologia e semiotica nel dibattito sulla gravidanza per altri

This article focuses on some characteristics of ideological discourses, starting from the analysis of the movie Tuttinsieme (Puccioni, 2020), and the comments it arose on the subject of surrogacy and rainbow families. Drawing on Gal and Irvine’s (2019) theories on ideology — which the two American scholars describe as the domain of the erasure of certain features of reality that appear obvious to others, and of the fractal repetition of a certain strategy of remating one’s own claims about reality itself —, I try to show how these concepts can be refined within the framework of structuralist semiotics, mainly referring to the theories developed by Greimas (1983) and Prieto (1975), as well as to my past research on the topic–focus backbone of narratives. Ideological discourses such as the ones I analyse in these pages, in fact, can be studied as narratives about the nature of things, where two factions of subjects who see them in very different ways, on the basis of distant and apparently irreconcilable value systems, are opposed to each other. This is why, at the end of my work, drawing on Eco’s (1975) theories, I wonder whether a way out of the mechanisms supposed by ideological confrontation does actually exist.