Luca Maude Berkley (b. 1994 London, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist currently working in New Mexico. Their work revolves around imperialism, fantasy, and performative gender in the contemporary American West. They are also the art editor of Contra Viento, a literary arts magazine publishing work on rangelands of the world.
“My work focuses on the western American Dream through the eyes of someone who failed to achieve it. I worked as a cowboy for nearly four years on cattle ranches around the Southwest but was forced to abandon this as a career after experiencing the gender discrimination, homo- and transphobia, and labor exploitation that is rampant in the ranching world. In my work I seek to examine the ways that, regardless of gender or sexuality, white cowboys remain mascots for the American Empire: how they uphold its virtues, spread its religion and culture, and offer a beguiling face to mask its genocidal, imperialist capitalism. The white cowboy is a mythic figure, an avatar for America itself, and he stands astride our collective imaginations as an emblem of all that is admirable or enviable about the United States. He is sexually attractive, in some form, to every gender and orientation, and has been eagerly adopted by white queer people in recent years. My artistic work hinges on performance: drag performance; the performance of photographing the West; gendered labor performances; and the performance of self that the West demands of its cowboy and would-be cowboy denizens. My characters Jenn Deere and Piper Pelligrini are white women ranchers on opposite ends of the political/aesthetic spectrum, and are vessels for ridiculing white agricultural fantasies. Jack Lope, if you didn’t know, is the greatest cowboy America has ever seen. Through drag and queer-informed visual media, my work reveals the fallacies of American ranching and critiques the white imperialist mentalities that would perpetuate it.
As our climate apocalypse hits ever harder, land use, food production, and labor will need to be at the forefront of our vision for a better world. Agricultural laborers are ignored, unprotected, and often might as well be unpaid. Farm and ranch workers face mental and physical harm daily in their workplaces and suffer from absurdly high rates of suicide (a statistic that has been misrepresented as farmers and ranchers – a crucial difference). As a white, college-educated, able-bodied person, my experience in ranch work was a massively privileged one. Yet the strictures of ag work are so great that, after four years, I too suffered from severe depression and suicidal ideation. When envisioning a better world for agriculture, ecology, and food, labor must remain fixed in the forefront. Class, gender, and whiteness all contribute to the perpetuation of regressive American pastoral fantasies, and the lure of the cowboy is no exception. Agricultural reform in the United States will always, eventually, run up against the white cowboy, who guards our most sacred ideals of private landownership, the cishetero nuclear family, and expansionism. Dismantling who the white cowboy is and what he does will aid in creating more just agricultural systems and land reform, and fuel a stronger, queerer pursuit of anti-imperialist liberation.”
