Wendy Vogel on Sophia Giovannitti – Review

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In the opening pages of Working Girl, Sophia Giovannitti, artist, writer, sex worker, argues for her choice of pleasure labor over the drudgery of a day job. When I say making pleasure work, I mean selling sex and art, she writes, not because doing what you love makes work more bearable, but because the particular economic conditions of these industries facilitate schemes and scams that allow people to work less and do what you love most. Given this fiery start, I expected a complete Marxist dismantling of the art market, or perhaps an angry manifesto in the Virginie Despentess King Kong Theory (2006). Giovannitti borrows elements from both, at a cooler temperature, as she pleads to make the system work to her advantage. Bridging memoirs and critiques, her volume charts a journey through contemporary art addressing prostitution and pornography, the blind spots of movements like MeToo, the politicized actions of sex workers, and finding a way to live beyond work.

Much of Giovannitti’s text oscillates between a discussion of erotically laden art and his own experiences of navigating sex work. Drawing on the scholarship of art historians such as Julia Bryan-Wilson, Giovannitti revisits a handful of now historic works. She views pieces such as Argentinian artist Carlos Ginzburgs Latin American Prostitute (1974) from the perspective of another escort. She offers an updated and intersectional analysis of Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 performance Sitea tableau vivant homage to Manets Olympia (1865), absent from the black maid by referencing texts on black femininity by artists Lorraine OGrady and Aria Dean. She notes the blatant sexist and factual misreadings of Andrea Frasers’ video Untitled (2003), in which she sleeps with an unidentified collector in a hotel.

Later in the book, she compares earlier works to those of her contemporaries. She writes a nuanced assessment of Jeff Koons’ sexually explicit series, Made in Heaven (1989), created with his then-wife Cicciolina, Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller, whose work he once celebrated at the screen, then armed her in a nasty custody battle. . The series is read against Shawn Michaelain Holloways 2010s performances as a camgirl, as well as his own erotic works in homage to Koons/Cicciolinas compositions. Discussing more recent photographic series of sexual acts, such as Natacha Merritts’ book Digital Diaries (2000) and Paul Mpagi Sepuyas’ portraits of queer men from the last decade, she asks an important question: erotic art must it be construed as joyless for being political?

Alongside these critical reassessments, Giovannitti details the shifting legal tapestry of sex work. She writes that legislation purporting to make this work safer, such as sex trafficking laws, creates paradoxically more dangerous conditions for marginalized populations. These orders often leave undocumented workers and those who engage in survival sex more vulnerable to state surveillance and violence. Giovannitti’s accounts of the act of prostitution, however, center on his own experience. In doing so, it avoids carrying out further brutality by speaking on behalf of positions less protected than its own. At the same time, she recognizes that she is capitalizing on a desire for confessional art evident both in the literary world’s personal essay boom and in the art world’s demand for authenticity. Making intimacy is also a job that I know how to do: studied revelation is the specialty of the whore, she adds.

As a cis, white woman in her early thirties with a network of supportive family and friends, Giovannitti understands her substantial privilege in sex work and society at large. Her decision to fund art through sex work is partly based on the hyperinflated markets for both in New York, as well as the high rate she commands due to Eurocentric standards of desirability. She admits she could find work elsewhere, even recalling a short stint in a low-level 9-to-5 editing job that she describes as overwhelming. Instead, she sees sex work as part of a larger anti-work philosophy. The heart of Giovannitti’s book are his confessionals reflecting on his own encounters with exclusively male clients.

By turns flat, smarmy and sometimes sweet, his stories avoid excessive detail to preserve his clients’ anonymity. In a chapter titled On Violation, Giovannitti tells some complicated stories of regulars adjacent to the art world. One client was an art insider who violated an agreement to provide promised media relations, whose consent Giovannitti presumably (unwittingly) violated while intoxicated when they first met. Another client, very wealthy, dangled, then retracted, an offer to order a work of art. He added insult to injury by refusing to participate in one of Giovannitti’s plays, which he considered an artistic project. I was humbled that he used the word project, and not work, because in no area of ​​my professional life was my work considered work, she writes. She insists that these attacks on her dignity, as an artist, cut as deeply, if not more, than any degradation at work.

I found this description of intellectual(ized) violence a little too clumsy. Giovannitti’s decision to selectively acknowledge his privilege and move his narrative beyond the genre of traumatic pornography is understandable. Yet I felt that such a statement obscured the structural conditions underlying his work. In other sections of the book, however, Giovannitti delves into the psychological complexities of his dual role. She details a period of dissociation, during which she worked frequently. Additionally, she questions the feedback loop relationship between funding art through sex and creating art through working in the sex industry. Is this a capitulation to the kind of writing and art that society loves most to squeeze out of female artists? she asks. I wonder if there is a circular internalization of misogyny in this choice: that girls are taught to see their value in sex, therefore to monetize it, thinking that they have overcome the system, but that in ultimately their value through sex is just enhanced, so they start to see their creative value in that vein too.

A measure of the success of Giovannitti’s text is that it prompts reflection and solidarity with how other professions, which have no superficial connection to sex work, capitalize on our physical and emotional labor. After finishing his book, I found myself thinking about something very unsexy: last year’s strike at the university where I teach. Giovannitti writes that sex work requires a level of detachment. In this sense, it resembles many other jobs under capitalism. Teaching, however, is generally seen as the opposite of the Madonnawhore gender dyad, and has historically been valued as a quasi-spiritual calling. During the strike, I sometimes got angry at the proclamations of emotion and the sweet acts of strikebreaking, as if our well of work was as infinite as our love, and as if emotional labor demanded sacrifice.

In art, sex, and academia, not to mention reproductive acts of caregiving and parenting, there is a social taboo around the frank discussion of money, presumed to taint this work by reducing it to the transactional. Giovannitti’s book offers a perspective on intimacy work in a very different register of education without extended working hours, union benefits, societal respect, legal protections, but it made me reconsider my own thinking in course on affective work in pedagogy, and can open up a field for such reflections among readers from other cultural fields. She sees potential in the underground networks of sex work for relationships to exist outside the capitalist distinctions of leisure and work. I don’t want to be a whore forever, she writes. I want to be an artist forever. I hope we don’t always have to work and sell to live.

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