Author: Sophia Giovannitti
Publisher: Verso
Hardback
One of our books of the year 2024!
Enya says:
I’ve been a fan of Sophia Giovannitti’s work for a long time, her essays, interviews and performances range across numerous topics from selling sex, selling art, having sex, making art, capitalism, freedom, love, work, and incarceration. Her work combines theory, and the personal seamlessly. Working Girl orbits around the comparative acts of selling sex and selling art, exploring what it means to sell these two things marked as ‘sacred’, when capitalism has corrupted everything we do and sell anyway, often monopolising and commodifying such sacred things. This isn’t to say that we should give into capitalism, but, more radically, examine how it operates in every element of our lives in order to attempt to live more freely: to spend less of our waking hours at the whim of our bosses, to ensure safety of sex workers and migrants and all suffering at the hands of capitalism, racism and the state, and to revel in beauty and desire. And this is what Sophia tries to do: work as little as possible for as much money as possible so she can make art, support her community and love in heaps.
Giovannitti is extremely generous throughout the book, at the beginning she writes that both art and sex act as ‘conduit[s] to a feeling’, something vital in comparison to much sterile discourse on both art and sex, and invites the reader to feel deeply throughout the book by giving insights into her own feelings and experiences throughout her life. She shares snippets of poetry from Frank O’Hara, lyrics from Leonard Cohen, joyous memories of hosting a huge party for her friends and details of a bloodletting performance between her and her boyfriend, all between the much harsher realities of the state, the law, death and the tapped psyches of a lot of men.
I think this generosity and onus on feeling is vital in how we conduct our lives, how we think about contemporary discourse, which can often be usurped by liberalism, and how we make sure to break away from constraints, and to ensure freedom for all. So beautiful and full of life!