Sophia Giovannitti is Shifting How We See Art and Sex Work

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Artist Sophia Giovannitti is not working right now. At least, not in the way that we’re used to thinking of it. She’s not worked to make money for a full year. Instead, Giovannitti has been producing work as we think of it creatively: writing and art specifically. She’s been free to pursue whatever piques her creative interest - “I know what my ‘real work’ is [...] That could and would be structure enough, but I do need to make money,” Giovannitti explains down the line from her home in New York. Stating plain and simple the anxiety between material survival and creative flourishing, Giovannitti is refreshingly candid about her intersecting privileges that often tip the balance in her favour.

This tension is one that she unpicks in her new book Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex. Sophia dissects her personal experience as a sex worker and artist, demonstrating that the dichotomies and delusions that exist very plainly in a sex work context are very much there in the art world, they’re just better disguised. The book blends Sophia’s own tales of being an artist and sex worker and meeting clients with her theoretical thinking and dissections in a way that feels fresh and accessible. I met with her to discuss her new book, art, sex, capitalism and how to create the world that we want to see.

As a creative, what appealed to you about the book format?

I’ve always been a writer. I used to write shorter essays which I don’t really do as much anymore. In the internet clickbait-y writing culture, it can feel frustrating how things have to be timely and content-oriented and churned out. That put me off shorter form writing and made me feel interested in longer form writing and really sitting with the same project for a while and letting it unfold in a particular way. 

I had proposed this book as an essay series to a magazine and then me and the editor both fell off in the pandemic. There was also something about the lockdown and indoors moment of the pandemic that definitely also lent itself to long-form writing and thinking. I was also in touch with the person who became my editor, Jessie at Verso, who I really loved and connected with intellectually. She helped me shape what was more of an amorphous concept into what could be something book-shaped, as she called it!

I’m interested in, and I know you talk about this in the book, the form of it and the way that it’s confessional, or if not confessional then personal. What was your decision to make it that way?

In part, that was the way I learned to write: memoir blended with less personal observations or criticisms or history. A lot of that had to do with the moment that I started writing in which was the boom of the personal essay. Verso had also published these two both really amazing books that influenced me a lot: Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant and Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith. 

Both are incredible and in the beginning of both, the authors say, my writing and my knowledge in this area is informed by my own experiences as a sex worker but I’m not going to talk about those experiences. I was thinking about that because I was working with that same press, but I didn’t want my book to be either/or. That doesn’t feel true to how I think about my experiences and to how I want to write; the only reason I wouldn’t include my personal experiences is if I felt like then it would make me not be taken seriously as a thinker or theorist. I felt like I don’t really give a fuck! It’s really interesting to me to trouble that distinction. I do really understand why people resist the confessional or the personal, especially if you have a certain subject position where that’s what’s expected or demanded of you, as though your only contribution can be your lived experience. That just doesn’t apply to me […] because of all of my intersecting privileges.

A key point you raise is that art and sex both sell affect and emotion. It made me think of this part in Ways of Seeing by John Berger about photography and how we prize originals over reproductions because we expect a moving experience of them. I loved that parallel and wondered how you view that in your work?

I’m really interested in addressing the question of how one knows whether something is an original or not in my own work. This is a funny thing to say as a “confessional writer”, but the more information you keep to yourself, the more value you retain because the more people don’t know what they are or aren’t getting from you. 

I did this piece in 2021 at Recess where I turned the space into an in-call; I posted an ad and solicited a collector to buy a performance piece from me for $20k. The whole conceit of the piece was that there will be no record of the piece except for a certificate of authenticity. Part of the idea of having no documentation in that instance is the idea that then I’m the only one who knows if it’s an “original” or not, whereas if I filmed or recorded or did any documentation around it, then I would be relinquishing the value of being able to resell the original over and over again. 

I love all the manufactured scarcity in art, it’s so funny, honestly. A lot of that stuff comes up in sex work in a more direct way, also because it’s interpersonal, at least with in person sex work: “What’s your real name? Have you seen another client today? Have you ever done this with a client?”

Could you also explain your wariness around sex positivity?

I don’t think of any of my views as prescriptive, and I think of sex positivity as prescriptive. All of the choices and ways that we relate to sex, and all of the options for women to relate to sex, are distorted by the conditions that we live under. 

Whatever you personally want to do that will reward you with the most autonomy, joy and will to live your life is great. I don’t think there’s anything inherently good about sex, period, or having a lot of sex. To me, [sex positivity] goes along with some of the empowerment narratives, where things don’t have to be good in order to be worth doing or ok to do. And things don’t have to be healthy either! 

I think that it’s also OK to be drawn to things that make you feel bad, or curious about things that make you feel bad. Some of these schools of thought, like sex positivity, are this attempt to rescue sex and sex for women from this patriarchal hellhole, which I get, but I think it’s kind of misguided.

When you said ‘there is no outside to work’ in the book, that shifted how I certainly think about the capitalist delusion. Could you speak a bit more to that idea?

In American capitalism, all of life is structured around work, in the literal sense of you have to trade your labour in order to be able to afford to literally survive. But also in the sense of all of our social lives, sex lives, family and domestic lives are structured around work. All of the time that is “off” is still very much inflected by the “on” time. 

There isn’t a reason for life to be structured around work other than discipline and social control and serving capitalism. It doesn’t need to be, and especially as technology advances. 

There’s so much panic right now around AI taking everyone’s jobs, which I completely understand because there are no structures in place for people without jobs to still have money and survive, so of course that’s a totally logical response. But it’s so wild to me that that’s what all of the panic is structured around as opposed to, ok, there is massive technological advancement, it is going to wipe out tons of industries, so how will we restructure society in response?

Words: Jemima Skala

Buy Working Girl from Verso Books here.