Breaking the cringe ceiling

'Raygun' is everything wrong with Australia today

I look back fondly on my own breakdancing days.

I’d spin and pop to the encouragement of the crowd. I’d hear the roar as I went up on my head, at least in my head. I had such fun.

I was seven, and the stage was the kitchen floor at our house in Parkes. My mother was the audience, and also happened to be cooking dinner.

Now I’ve grown up, and if I was ever to put myself out there to breakdance in public, I would make darn sure that I’d trained my backside off to not make an idiot of myself. I’d practice locking and popping like the gangsterist ghetto basketballer out there to avoid public humiliation.

Not so our Olympians. As you might be aware by now, Australia sent an overweight, overconfident, uncoordinated Millennial female to represent the nation in Paris.

It was bad.

Really bad.

She’s become a global laughingstock. Even the New York Times is laying the boot in.

My first reaction when our family watched this monstrosity of incompetence was to rush to her defence. At least she was having a go, right? We like underdogs in Australia. She’s gutsy, etc.

But that type of defence only works for someone who doesn’t also take themselves too seriously. When Steven Bradbury won accidental gold by not being in an accident, we could all celebrate his success because it was clear he also knew that he’d won gold by sheer luck.

This is a loveable Aussie underdog

Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn is not a loveable Aussie underdog. She’s the exact opposite. The 36-year-old thinks she’s amazing, and she’s been able to live in that delusion until yesterday when the whole world saw the reality at the same time.

Of course, the media had been boosting her, and her lack of self-insight in interviews is absolutely breathtaking.

The more I learn about Raygun, the angrier I get. That’s because our society is being taken over by Rayguns. This type of overconfident female has so thoroughly colonised our public and private sector bureaucracies that we are now ruled by a caste of Karens whose overconfidence is exceeded only by their incompetence.

They are always the victim in their own minds, too. Raygun has a scholarship to the NSW Institute of Sport, and they pushed out a press release about her three months ago focusing on how she’s been a victim of discrimination, body-shaming and intimidation and how she used to cry in the toilet because the boys were so mean to her.

I think most people don’t know what breaking is,” she said patiently. “They haven’t seen a breaking battle in the last 20 years, so they don’t know what the level is . . . how complex it’s become, and how athletic it is. They’re thinking it’s just someone who does The Worm and they win that battle, or they do a head spin, and the battle is over. There’s a lot more to it than that. It doesn’t bother me personally . . . I’ve always taken a different path in things; doing my PhD, I’m an arts academic as well, so I think most people think I’m a bit of a weirdo!

I reckon you’re right, Raygun.

Raygun is a lecturer at Macquarie University. Someone in that position earns about $100,000 full-time equivalent annually. According to her university biography, Raygun “is an interdisciplinary and practice-based researcher interested in the cultural politics of breaking.”

The cultural politics of breaking. When I think back to my own breakdancing days on the kitchen floor, I wonder what people back then would have called ‘the cultural politics of breaking’.

I reckon they’d call that ‘bullshit’.

Raygun gets a hundred thousand dollars a year to bullshit and, through her teaching position, spread that bullshit into the minds of thousands of young adults over the course of a career.

Raygun has a PhD in breaking, of course. It was awarded in 2017 for her thesis ‘Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl's Experience of B-boying’. Here’s the abstract:

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 crewmember, this thesis questions why so few female participants engage in this creative space, and how breakdancing might be a space to displace and deterritorialize gender. I use analytic autoethnography and interviews with scene members in collaboration with theoretical frameworks offered by Deleuze and Guattari, 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 deterritorialize 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.

More bullshit. Don’t try and understand what Raygun wrote. It’s just a wall of word salad.

I know that because I also have a PhD. Mine was more connected to reality, though. Professor Margaret Sheil censored my thesis, however, so it can’t be found in databases, and I can never work in academia. Thanks to Antifa and the US-based Southern Poverty Law Centre, I can probably never work again anywhere.

While Raygun makes a fortune and goes to the Olympics on nothing but bullshit, there are many wrongthinkers like me who have been cancelled from ever getting a job again due to us saying true things that powerful people don’t like. Or for not getting the jab. Or for making a joke that the Karens in HR didn’t like.

If only we’d learned to bullshit like Raygun. She’s certainly prolific. Her contributions to knowledge include such published bangers as: ‘The ethics of living a double life: rethinking ownership, authenticity, and identity in hip hop culture’ (bullshit); ‘Where the #bgirls at? Politics of (in)visibility in breaking culture’ (bullshit); ‘"Don't Worry, it's Just a Girl!": negotiating and challenging gendered assumptions in Sydney's breakdancing scene’ (feminist bullshit); and ‘Dancing away distinction: queering hip hop culture through all style battles’ (obligatory gay bullshit).

If you want to know who is behind the subversion and destruction of Western societies, academia is a place to look. Powerful people have worked hard for decades to promote a neo-Marxist identity cult in our universities, shoving merit, rigour and scholastic achievement to the side in favour of ideologically conformist nonsense.

Karens like Raygun have flourished in this politicised, standards-free environment. For as long as she stayed on campus, Raygun could pretend that she was a serious academic and even an accomplished breakdancer.

Raygun got ahead of herself, though. She began to get high on her own supply, and so she no doubt politicked and networked to get herself selected for the Australian Olympic team. She thought the applause she heard in her head would be replicated around the world.

What a mistake. You can be an incompetent fraud as long as you stay out of public view. Raygun didn’t do that.

The Olympic stage is one of the most public places in the world, and Raygun revealed herself to the world.

She revealed Australia in the current year, too.