ABSTRACT
Desire, the body, sexual practices, and identities constitute the transnational and transmedial landscape of eighteenth-century writings about gender. Taking as a case study anatomist Giovanni Bianchi's 1744 medical novella about Catterina Vizzani, who transitions to Giovanni Bordoni to become the first transgender protagonist whose life story and medical history are memorialized in a literary work, this chapter addresses its afterlife and evolution in translation. The science of sex and procreation animated the research of anatomists throughout Europe who sought to understand the nature of sexual desire as manifested in the body, but also in the mind and the human heart. By analyzing the 1744 original Breve storia di Catterina Vizzani together with its 1751 translation into English by John Cleland and its anonymous German translation in 1755, and the many ancillary documents these three texts generated across languages, this chapter offers a transnational insight into the debates around early modern sexualities. It probes gender, sexuality, performativity, human relations, feelings, and ultimately, identity through primary sources that reflect the personal and social stakes of sexuality transnationally in early modern Europe.
