Although breakdancing fits in with recent Olympic innovations such as traditional women’s boxing, a sport in which women of all genders compete, Australian breakdancer Rachael “Raygun” Gunn completely stunned the judges of the “Breaking” competition (apparently it’s just called “Breaking” now) that recently concluded in Paris.
The scorekeepers were not very happy with Raygun’s kangaroo act (which puts the finishing touches on hip-hop, so to speak), awarding each of her three numbers zero out of a possible 18. It’s all so reminiscent of Kevin Phillips Bong, who got next to no votes in Monty Python’s election night sketch, but who, like Ms. Gunn, found the performance worthy of praise nonetheless, breaking out (no pun intended) into an uplifting rendition of “climb every mountain, ford every stream ’til you find your dream.”
It seems to me that the judges have overlooked something here, because preference should be given to our Rachel because she is a certified “expert” in the theoretical foundations of her sport discipline and even holds a doctorate on the subject of “displacement and deterritorialization of gender” through breakdancing.
She draws on highly qualified philosophical experts such as “Deleuze and Guttari, Butler, Bourdieu and other feminist and post-structuralist philosophers” who haunt some of our crazier academia, academic dinosaurs the world has forgotten. Here is the abstract of her Macquarie Uni paper (try reading all the polysyllabic sludge before catatonia sets in):
This work critically examines how masculinist practices of breakdancing provide a site for transgressing gender norms. Drawing on my own experiences as a woman in Sydney’s male-dominated breakdancing scene, first as a spectator, then as an active crew member, this work questions why so few female participants engage in this creative space and how breakdancing might be the site to displace and deterritorialize gender. I use analytical autoethnography and interviews with scene members in conjunction with theoretical frameworks from 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 also to locate the potential for moments of transgression. In other words, I conceptualize the breaking body not as a “body” constituted by prescriptions and assumptions, but as an assemblage open to new rhizomatic connections. Breaking is a space that includes difference, with the rituals of dance not only reinforcing its capacity to deterritorialize the body but also enabling new possibilities for performativities beyond the boundaries of dominant mindsets and normative gender constructions. Consequently, this thesis seeks to contribute to what I consider to be a significant gap in scholarship on hip hop, breakdance, and autoethnographic explorations of Deleuze and Guattar’s theory..
You have to love these “rhizomatic connections” (I think I have a few of these things in my garden) and how they “create new possibilities for performativity beyond the boundaries of dominant mindsets and normative gender constructions” (although the rhizomes in my garden actually produce something more useful and tasty than this pile of philosophical compost for my PhD).
Maybe I’m being too harsh, because like Raygun, I’ve long been concerned about the “significant gap in scholarship on hip-hop, breakdance, and autoethnographic investigations of Deleuze and Guattar’s theory.” Surprisingly, the World Economic Forum hasn’t caught on to this yet, so Raygun fills a big gap.
It must be obvious by now that the critics who judged her Olympic performance were unable to see how Raygun managed to subversively “enterritorialize” her body, and we will never be the wiser now that the pre-structuralist philistines have dashed any hope of further academic feminist enlightenment through hip-hop contortions because that whole ridiculous “sport” has been dropped from the 2028 LA Olympics, although perhaps Raygun can still salvage something from the disaster by monetizing her newfound fame (107,000 Instagram followers, up from 4,000 before the Olympics). Perhaps she has a future as a presenter of the Today Show or candidate on I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here.
In the meantime, I would advise Raygun (who climbs all the mountains and all) to take legal action because, we can at least assume, not a single Olympic official has taken her aside and warned her: “Look, honey, if you really want to make a complete fool of yourself on the international stage, we can’t stop you. But the consequences could be ugly.”
While social media (which should have long since been “tamed” by e-safety officers and various other censors and guardians of public ideological taste) is awash with familiar Australian derision of Raygun’s aesthetic endeavours, the “better” class of people have sided with Rachel, including Australia’s Head of Mission in Paris, who has called criticism of Raygun’s bizarre performance by “trolls and keyboard warriors” as, you guessed it, “misogynistic abuse” of a woman who is vilely despised in a male-dominated sport. The Breaking Federation also says it offered Gunn “mental health support” in the “following of the online criticism.” At least no one accused this white woman of “cultural appropriation” of an art form(?) usually associated with black ghetto youth.
And how could it be that Raygun is dissolving rigid and oppressive gender stereotypes — “dissolving” is really a pun — that this modern “strong woman” was so quick to cry and blame everything on misogyny rather than a single lack of talent? Or is this the new feminist explanation when performance isn’t enough?
Perhaps, however, her Olympic performance, like her thesis about the once fashionable but still existent esotericism of Baudrillardian theory, was an elaborate hoax to expose the “sport” of breakdancing and its lecturing “experts,” like those parodies of postmodernist/structuralist “discourse” that so easily deceive the supposed experts and peer reviewers. But if her entire atrocious Olympic performance was genuine, we should at least recognize that with her own practice of poststructuralist feminist theory and the practice of the false sport of “breakdancing,” Raygun achieved through that big fat zero what we old Marxists used to call “praxis,” the unity of theory and practice.
