A Clean Break with Talent and Scholarship

Although breakdancing fits in with the latest Olympic innovations like the traditional sport of wife beating in the guise of all-gender “women’s” boxing, Australian breakdancer Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn totally flummoxed the judges in Paris recently at the ‘breaking’ competition (apparently it is just called ‘breaking’, now) just concluded in Paris.

The scorers didn’t warm to Raygun’s kangaroo-themed performance (putting the hop in hip-hop, if you like) and they awarded zero points out of a possible eighteen for each of her three routines. It is all so reminiscent of Kevin Phillips Bong who got bugger all votes in the Monty Python election night sketch but who, like Ms. Gunn, still thought the effort praiseworthy by breaking (no pun intended) into an uplifting rendition of ‘climb every mountain, ford every stream ‘til you find your dream’.

Now it seems to me as judges have missed a trick here because our Rachel should be deferred to because she is a certified ‘expert’ in the theoretical underpinnings of her sporting discipline, having an actual PhD in the subject of “displacing and deterritortorialising gender” through breakdancing.

Drawing on super-qualified philosophical experts such as “Deleuze and Guttari, Butler, Bourdieu and other feminist and post-structuralist philosophers” who roam at large, academic dinosaurs the world forgot, in some of our crazier tertiary institutions. Here is the precis of her Macquarie Uni treatise, (see if you can make it all the way through the polysyllabic sludge before catatonia sets in):

This thesis critically interrogates how masculinist practices of breakdancing offers a site for the transgression of gendered norms. Drawing on my own experiences as a female within the male-dominated breakdancing scene in Sydney, first as a spectator, then as an active crew member, this thesis questions why so few female participants engage in this creative space, and how breakdancing might be the space to displace and deterritorialise gender. I use analytic autoetthnography and interviews with scene members in collaboration with theoretical frameworks offered by Deleuze and Guttari, Butler, Bourdieu and other feminist and post-structuralist philosophers, 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. Breaking is a space that embraces difference, whereby the rituals of the dance not only augment its capacity to deterritorialise the body, but also facilitate new possibilities for performativities beyond the confines of dominant modes of thought and normative gender construction. Consequently, this thesis attempts to contribute to what I perceive as a significant gap in scholarship on hip-hop, breakdancing, and autoethnographic explorations of Deleuze-Guattarian theory.

Gotta love those “rhizomatic connections” (I think I may have some of those thingys in my garden) and how they “facilitate new possibilities for performativities beyond the confines of dominant modes of thought and normative gender construction” (although my garden rhizomes actually produce something more useful and palatable than this PhD pile of philosophical compost).

Perhaps I am being too harsh because, along with Raygun, I have long been worried about the “significant gap in scholarship on hip-hop, breakdancing, and autoethnographic explorations of Deleuze-Guattarian theory”. The World Economic Forum, surprisingly, hasn’t cottoned on to this yet, so Raygun is filling a big gap.

It must by now be obvious the knuckle-scrapers who judged her Olympic performance weren’t able to discern how Raygun has managed to subversively ‘deterritorialize’ her body, and we will never be the wiser now that the pre-structuralist Philistines have killed off any hope of further academic feminist enlightenment through hip-hop gyrations because this whole risible ‘sport’ has been dropped from the 2028 LA Olympics, although Raygun might be able to salvage something from the disaster by monetizing her new found fame (107,000 Instagram followers, up from 4,000 pre-Olympics). Perhaps she she has a future as a host of the Today Show or contestant on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.

In the meantime, my advice to Raygun (climb every mountain and all that) would be to take legal action because, or so we can assume, not a single Olympics official took her aside and warned ‘Look, luv, if you really want to make a complete tit of yourself on an international stage, we can’t stop you. But the consequences could be ugly.’

Whilst social media (which is overdue for ‘taming’ through e-safety commissioners and sundry other censors and guardians of public ideological taste) has proliferated with good old Australian mockery of Raygun’s aesthetic efforts, the ‘better’ class of people have rallied to Rachel’s side, including Australia’s Chef de Mission in Paris who has labelled criticism by “trolls and keyboard warriors” of Raygun’s bizarre performance as, you guessed it, indulging in “misogynistic abuse” of a woman hideously scorned in a male-dominated sport. The Breaking Federation also says it has offered Gunn ‘mental-health support’ in the ‘wake of online criticism’. At least no one has accused this white woman of ‘cultural appropriation’ of an art(?) form usually associated with black ghetto yoof.

As for Raygun breaking down — ‘breaking’ really does lend itself to puns — rigid and oppressive gender stereotypes, how has this modern ‘strong woman’ so quickly been reduced to crying and blaming it all on misogyny rather than a singular lack of talent.

Or is that the new go-to feminist explanation when achievement falls short?

Perhaps, however, like her thesis on the once-fashionable but still extant esoterica of Baudrillardian theory, her Olympic performance was an elaborate con to expose the ‘sport’ of breaking and its pontificating ‘experts’, like those spoofs of post-modernist/structuralist ‘discourse’ that so easily fool the alleged experts and peer reviewers. But if her whole ghastly Olympic performance was all genuine, we should at least acknowledge that Raygun has achieved what we old Marxists used to call ‘praxis’, the unity of theory and practice, with her own praxis of post-structuralist feminist theory and the practice of the fake sport of ‘breaking’ by scoring that big fat zero.