I spend a lot of time staring at working-class women. Because of the PhD research I'm currently doing, I get paid to sit at my desk and peer at the way their bodies have been represented, misrepresented, romanticised, and mocked. Sometimes, this can feel a little strange. I'm forced to embody the gaze of the institutionalised academic researcher, and historically, that gaze is a firmly middle-class one. This makes me something of a class voyeur. What does it mean to have a middle-class gaze? And to cast it at working-class women?

This middle-class gaze has been studying working-class women throughout art history. We might think of Jean-François Millet's female labourers, or Martin Parr's seaside grannies. Though much work is now being done to centre artists from diverse backgrounds, less thought has been given to the place of the working-class woman as muse. When we look, we do so with our bank balance, cultural preferences, family histories, and so much more. In Britain especially, our ways of seeing are inevitably shaped by class politics.

Like all gazes, the middle-class gaze projects assumptions, fantasies and desires onto its subjects. As a result, we must ask ourselves what exactly we are seeing when we see working women's bodies represented. Whose assumptions, fantasies and desires are seeping through?

The three artists that follow have each chosen working-class women as their subjects. This itself is nothing new, but these artists foreground spectatorship itself, bringing tricky questions of agency, relationality and desire to the fore. In each of their works, I am reminded of the classed dynamics of looking. I am reminded of both a proximity to and a distance from my subjects, and of the need to hold both in mind as I go about my work.

Beryl Cook (1926–2008) was born in Egham and started her career as a showgirl, coming to art relatively late in life. Despite regularly being described as Britain's best-loved artist, Cook has received an astonishing lack of critical attention.

A recent joint exhibition with Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London began to challenge this, as a new generation of critics found Cook for the first time. Cook was known for her portraits of fat, fleshy working-class women, usually engaged in leisure activities – sipping a pint, or swirling on the dancefloor. Though these portraits have often been described as comic, this is itself something of an imposition. Where is the comedy in works such as Hen Party II (1995) or By the Clyde (1992)? Is Cook really laughing at her subjects?

I think this is a common misconception about Cook, in which pleasure is mistaken for comedy. These paintings don't subscribe to a notion of working-class women as grossly excessive or comically 'too much' but instead equate physical scale with power and immense pleasure. Cook loved to see 'the girls out and about enjoying themselves' and regularly painted herself in the style of her working-class muses. The dynamic between the lower middle-class Cook, well-spoken but reserved, and her loud, confident subjects remains a complex one, but it is a dynamic that foregrounds love and mutual satisfaction.

Though some have dismissed her work as derogatory voyeurism, to do so ignores the lifelong care, even aspiration, that Cook had towards her subjects. Her paintings upend the traditional hierarchies between painter and muse, as the working-class women in them exert a power over even the artist herself. Cook's legacy is one of liberating, utopian portraits of the traditionally denigrated: much more critical work demands to be done on them.

'Young British Artist' Sarah Lucas (b.1962) has also taken the working-class woman's body as her muse, though her representations are much less figurative, tending towards the sculptural and the abstract. As with Cook, Lucas' work often takes on a complex relationship with her own body. Utilising cheap, readily available materials, works such as Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996) and Got a Salmon On (1991) display an androgynous brand of working-class femininity, and are full of bawdy euphemism.

Work such as Pauline Bunny, first presented as part of the installation Bunny Gets Snookered (1997), in which seven mannequins were placed around a snooker table, explores the hyper-sexualisation of working-class people, morphing the bouncy Playboy bunny into something altogether more deflated, even sinister.

Cigarette Tits [Idealized Smokers Chest II] builds two absurdly circular breasts from unsmoked cigarettes, suspended in a black bra, and hung from a plainly functional chair. In doing so, it remakes the body out of classed symbols of leisure and disposability, playing both with phallic associations and with the idea of the woman's body as an addictive pleasure source. In both works, Lucas pushes an exaggeratedly sexualised voyeurism onto the viewer, forcing them to adopt the objectifying gaze so often implicitly cast over working-class women, and taking that gaze to comic extremes.

The middle-class gaze, so often one of censure and imposed judgement, is written large in these works. It is both mocked and mimicked, as the quiet violence of class voyeurism is exposed in the process.

These interests have most recently manifested in two of my favourite of Lucas' works, shown as part of her 'Happy Gas' retrospective at Tate Britain in 2023: SLAG (2022) and Fat Doris (2023). If earlier pieces asked how we look at young, glamourised working-class bodies, these more recent sculptures can be understood to interrogate the framing of a much less popular subject: the ageing sex worker. Lucas provocatively places these figures in the esteemed gallery space.

Lucas casts the woman in SLAG entirely in concrete, and forces us to deal with our discomfort in facing forms of sexuality less amenable to commodification. The particular promiscuity the word 'slag' implies is historically bound with mining areas and industrial waste. Sex work and masculine industry therefore coalesce, as the woman's body is cast both on and of the 'slag heap', a reputational metaphor and geographical waste-product.

Lucas highlights the libidinal impulses that so often drive our visual framing of working-class femininity. Amusement, arousal, and discomfort mingle together, as the viewer is made aware of the absence of a language through which to describe such bodies on their own terms.

Framings of femininity were equally important to photographer and writer Jo Spence (1934–1992). Spence began her career as a commercial photographer before collaborating with agitprop groups such as Hackney Flashers, creating work which sought to highlight the politics and potential of the photographic medium. Projects such as Who's Holding the Baby? (1978), recently displayed as part of Tate Britain's 'Women in Revolt!' exhibition, aimed to bring practical questions about time and labour into the gallery space.

As Spence's career developed, she became increasingly uncomfortable with some of the more voyeuristic aspects of such works, which necessarily involved the middle-class art world casting its gaze over working-class women. In Beyond the Family Album (1978–1979) and her later photo therapy projects, Spence asked how those dynamics – particularly between middle-class and working-class women – might be unpacked in relation to social mobility, second-wave feminism and the professionalised art world.

In Photo Therapy: Mother and Daughter Shame Work – Crossing Class Boundaries (1988), a collaboration with feminist sociologist Valerie Walkerdine, Spence plays the role of both her working-class mother (whom she described as an 'invisible worker') and herself as middle-class daughter, often placing two overlapping prints together. The series is both an exaggerated pastiche of the British class system, and a complex exploration of the emotional politics of social mobility. On one of the photos, Spence attributes a speech bubble to the mother figure: 'I'll be so proud of you Jo when you get your degree and learn to be ashamed of me.'

Spence was both aware of her middle-class position as an artist and keen to deconstruct the very makings of that position. Her gaze is ultimately neither middle- nor working-class, but she occupies a role in which she knowingly allows the two to clash, all the while leaning on the complex history of the photographic portrait as a way to produce new types of knowledge.

Though these three artists provide a way in to thinking about depictions of working-class women in art, there are many others that might have been included – from within the Art UK collection and beyond. We might think of Hannah Starkey's (b.1971) artfully constructed photographs of seemingly 'authentic' working-class women and girls, the records of everyday life left behind by Audrey Amiss (1933–2013), or the absurdist performance art that Rebecca Moss (b.1991) enacts against the Essex landscape in works such as Home Improvement.

These complicated works, each deconstructing the working-class woman as subject, are there if we choose to look for them – in fact, they foreground looking itself, and its inseparability from gender and class politics.

Jennifer Jasmine White, writer and researcher

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation