Description

Sex and art, we’re told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather-as Sophia Giovannitti argues here-acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live.

In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author’s own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.

Publisher Review

Highly original and unnervingly smart, Working Girl strips bare the worlds of art work and sex work, revealing unlikely parallels. In Giovannitti's informed and elegant analysis, sex and art come soaked in capitalist relations, their potential for holiness no barrier to the all-encompassing reach of commodification. Working Girl is fascinating in its specificity - the product of Giovannitti's lived experience in a particular niche of both industries - and through this comes a treatise that is both hopeful and new. -- Frankie Miren, author of The Service I love this book. It's fresh, exacting, and spaciously precisely unfettered. A book with a clear purpose fulfilled. Read it. -- Sarah Michelson, artist An art object that also verbs in the most pleasurable way possible. Filled with clarity and a generous spirit, Sophia Giovannitti's Working Girl is a singular sensation you immediately feel the power of while reading. And later, as you begin to release all your outdated beliefs, you then realize Working Girl completely turned out in the best way possible: you too can be the art object that verbs -- Tourmaline, artist Between the sex worker and art worker is a tension that defines the contemporary commodification of bodies, genders, time and desires. Working Girl documents Giovannitti's critical and creative interventions into this fraught and fascinating zone. She invites us to be more than voyeurs, and to think with her what is at stake in the art of sex and the sex of art -- McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is Dead In Working Girl Sophia Giovannitti considers the material and metaphorical overlap between the sexual and artistic marketplaces -- Josephine Houman * Public Seminar * Giovannitti writes with candor and complexity about a life at the center of two of her greatest cultural preoccupations: sex and capitalism. -- Maggie Lange * Bustle, Most Anticipated Books Of Spring & Summer 2023 * Giovannitti mines both her personal experiences as an artist and a sex worker as well as larger political ones to traces the ways the worlds of art and sex work have in common. In doing so, she finds a way to commit to art, sex, and work on her own terms - finding freedom within the larger forces at work. -- Most Anticipated Books of May 2023 * Nylon *