It's the type of scholarship, not Raygun's moves, that should worry us

Photo: asbe. iStock

To Rachael Gunn, aka “Raygun,” the Australian breakdancer whose zero-points performance at Paris 2024 on Friday went viral for all the wrong reasons — forcing me, yet again, to tune into Olympics news — to her I wanna say first up: sister, I feel for you because, believe me, I’ve been there. 

Primary school. Talent quest, I think. Even now the memory gets my cheeks burning. Pink-leotard. A packed hall. A stage. Me wiggling with ecstatic disinhibition to “Greased Lightnin.” And why not, I’d done the same thing at home in front of mum and she’d loved it!

Did I register in those kinetic moments the convulsive laughter from the audience? People shielding their eyes as if they were watching a horror movie, which this was, a self-inflicted shredding of my physical dignity that I would struggle to live down for years thereafter. (To old school friends who may be reading: the subject is henceforth verboten.)

True, Gunn is humiliated not as a child but as a 36 year-old, not at a primary school talent quest but on the world stage and not in the form of schoolyard teasing but in the ridicule of millions on social media so — same, same, but different. If it’s any comfort to Raygun, I still take to the dance floor with few inhibitions, even when I’m sober and even though my children snigger at my moves. The urge to wild abandonment in public spaces never subsides, traumatic memories notwithstanding. The internet can’t break your spirit, love. 

And I wouldn’t be bursting into prose if the only issue here was Raygun’s eccentric breaking. The real problem is her slippery writing. For Dr Rachael Gunn is also a lecturer in cultural studies and she studies breaking, a species of dance from the hip-hop genus that originated in the Bronx in the 1970s. Her work draws on what she describes as “ethnographic field research” as well as her experience as an “Australian breaking practitioner.” Gunn’s kangaroo and sprinkler routine at Paris was not born out of whimsy; it sprung from academia. 

Her 2022 PhD, entitled “Deterritorializing gender in Sydney’s breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s experience of B-boying” asks why so few women take part in breaking. She draws on the intellectual frameworks of feminist and post-structuralist philosophers, Judith Butler, the high priestess of queer theory, among them, “to critically examine how the capacities of bodies are constituted and shaped in Sydney’s breakdancing scene, and to also locate the potentiality for moments of transgression.”

“In other words, I conceptualize the breaking body as not a ‘body’ constituted through regulations and assumptions, but as an assemblage open to new rhizomatic connections.”

How effortlessly she breaks the confines of language and comprehension. 

She nonetheless appeared conflicted about breaking’s inclusion in the Olympics. (She needn’t have fretted; LA has since dumped it for 2028.) In a paper published online in April Gunn and co-author Lucas Marie interviewed fellow “practitioners” on their response to the news. While some welcomed the opportunity for wider recognition others worried about the “sportification” of breaking and loss of “self determination” for Australian breakers.

According to Gunn and Marie breaking doesn’t fit with the “idealized” Australian sporting hero who has a “large, muscular, White, cismale uniformed body.”

“We argue that breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racial and gendered hierarchies.”

Such sentiments raise uncomfortable questions in the wake of Raygun-gate. Was Gunn’s kangaroo-channelling performance in Paris an act of post-colonial resistance against the “sportification” of breaking? An elaborate up-yours to the institutional and commercial interests threatening to subdue what she lauds as breaking’s revolutionary impulse? For there she was in the Aussie uniform subverting the image of what she claims is our idealised sporting hero. Did Gunn, as one indigenous professor and sports administrator alleges, get zero points in three rounds “on purpose” for her academic study?

Out on the political left we can find both admirers and detractors. “I liked,” one mused, “how Raygun’s Olympic performance humiliated Australia as much as possible in the arena that our whole national personality is based on, & which vast public resources are shovelled into at the expense of, say, education & the arts.” Others from the identitarian left argue that she represents precisely the white institutionalised settler colonialism she claims to oppose: “Privileged beneficiary of colonialism mocks sport loved by its victims,” an X user sneers. Yet another is dismayed. “How is it POST-colonial if she is performing colonization?” 

Elsewhere at least one mainstream commentator wonders, half-jokingly, if Raygun pulled off an epic hoax, a spectacular piss-take of race and gender orthodoxies in the humanities and the arts. I wonder: could she be a troll as well as a martyr? 

But the evidence suggests we should take Gunn at face value. 

After last Friday’s event, she told the media: “I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative.”

Hers is a cautionary tale of the dangers of living too much in your head. Even breaking needs to be mastered before it can be broken down — deconstructed — with artistry. Turns out that you can’t compete in Olympic breakdancing without having the skills, “the dynamic and the power moves.”

Skills matter, as it turns out. Bodies matter. Even at the gender-bending, sex-denying Paris games, bodies matter. What Gunn describes in her thesis as the “breaking body” is ultimately just a body and not “an assemblage open to new rhizomatic connections.” 

Words matter too. When words lose their connection to reality there’s nothing left but to spin incoherently around one’s head. Sometimes literally.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should take note because he’s spinning more often than not.

“Raygun had a crack, good on her, and a big shout out to her,” he said on the weekend with all the sincerity of .. you know what, the words fail me.

“Whether they’ve won gold medals or just done their best, that’s all we asked for. It’s the participating that is really important.” 

To quote the aforementioned lefty on X, Australia does not “shovel vast public resources” into sport so our Olympians can have “a crack.” The Olympics are not primary school where everyone gets a prize for participation. Although so infantilising are the times that even the breaking judge felt it necessary to treat Gunn like a child. Just because you’re getting zero for everything doesn’t mean you’re bad, he told her. It’s just that the other B-girls were better. 

So much politeness from judges, from Olympic officials, from our governments. How we struggle to express stark truths such as “you are male and not female,” or “your dance routine sucks,” or “your thesis makes no sense.”

I’m tempted to wish Gunn’s academic output were marked as rigorously as her Olympic performance but that would amount to scapegoating. In churning out postmodern drivel — and hers is by no means the worst of its genre — the Macquarie University lecturer is meticulously in step with her peers. Perhaps she’s done us all a favour in shining a torch on the exuberant improvisation that these days passes as scholarship. 

When the Butlerian abstractions in her thesis got road tested at Paris the result was a car crash— or, as she might put it, “a moment of transgression.”