SEX WORKERS AS "CONCRETE OTHERS": POSSIBILITIES AND PERILS

Sex workers have long served as muses for some of the world's best-known artists. Though we see these women, exposed in various states of undress, on the walls of many of the world's most famous museums, they remain relatively anonymous. Visitors who stop to read the panels accompanying these works are rarely encouraged to reflect on questions about how exploitation empowerment might be observed through an intersectional lens, the role of sex work in society today, and what the defiant or vulnerable expressions on these women's faces might tell us about their relationships to the artists wielding paintbrushes and a different kind of power. This article outlines a recent pedagogical experiment at the Art Gallery of Ontario in which a small group of former and current sex workers engaged in a feminist hack of the institution's European Modern galleries. Drawing on Hamington's (2004) feminist ethics of care, a key component of which is to highlight the experiences of "concrete others" so that they are "no longer known only as abstract agents who are interchangeable with any others" (Hamington, 2004, p. 43), the participants in this study critiqued the labels accompanying two works of art depicting sex workers, and imagined what could be written instead if those with real-life experience in the profession were to interpret these canvasses for the general public. While Hamington's assessment that "knowledge creates the potential for care" (p. 43) may be correct, we argue that special considerations must be taken when it comes to applying a feminist ethics of care to sex-worker populations.