Sophia Giovannitti for Working Girl

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.

Sophia Giovannitti is a writer and artist based in New York. She has written on sex work and other topics for The New Inquiry, Document Journal, n+1, Jezebel, Vice, Bookforum, and SSENSE, among others.

She joins us in the bookshop this May to discuss her debut book Working Girl : On Selling Art and Selling Sex.

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.