‘I read B-girl Raygun’s academic work on colonial structures in breaking so you don’t have to’ | Jack Houghton

Australian breakdancer Raygun’s performance in Paris was humiliating but somehow her academic work on colonial structures in breakdancing is worse.

It’s official, Raygun has broken breakdancing, but there is a more insidious side to this Olympics scandal few journalists will dare touch, Jack Houghton for Sky News writes.

Millions have watched footage of Rachael ‘Sprinkler’ Gunn in Paris, flopping around the floor like a fish, and the odd performance has made headlines everywhere from the New York Times and Rolling Stone in America to The Telegraph in London.

Superstar singer Adele even stopped her concert to admit she and her friends were “shitting ourselves laughing for nearly 24 hours” after watching the highlights.

B-Girl Raygun made headlines around the world following her Olympic performance. Picture: Getty Images

At first, this writer felt sorry for the 36-year-old Olympian.

That is until a quiet Sunday afternoon was spent reading her academic work, published by Macquarie University, an organisation which receives hundreds of millions of dollars from you, the taxpayer.

I’m crying bc I think Raygun saw Mr G and decided to run with it at the #Olympics#breakdancepic.twitter.com/0FJLFIcKUi

— Jessica🇵🇸 (@sleepyJAK) August 9, 2024

It makes you question: does Raygun’s work represent everything that is wrong with modern academia?

Carve out a niche so narrow that you become the de facto expert, sprinkle in a tad of identity politics and radical race theory, and you have a career.

Think that’s harsh? Let’s analyse some extracts from her paper from June last year, titled: “The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: the possibilities and politics of sportification”.

Her abstract has all the academic buzzwords.

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

Rachael 'Raygun' Gunn is also a lecturer at Sydney’s Macquarie University. Picture: Getty Images

Ironically, this person has been so indoctrinated by American critical race theorists she does not even know how to spell “institutionalisation” and “racialised” in line with Australia’s grammatical traditions.

The paper is filled with this sort of gibberish, including suggestions breakdancing was a space for those who had been “othered” to “express themselves and engage in new hierarchies of respect”.

What my nephew does after telling all of us to “watch this” pic.twitter.com/366LjIRl4j

— Liz Charboneau (@lizchar) August 9, 2024

It would be funny if it were not for the fact that her university is propped up with taxpayer funds.

There also appears to be a degree of narcissism in this sort of academia with researchers inserting themselves into the paper like a self-promotion blog.

In the first sentence of Raygun’s introduction, she wrote about … Raygun.

Raygun failed to pick up any points during the competition. Picture: AFP

“On 8 December 2020, one of the authors, Rachael Gunn, woke up to a missed call from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) requesting an interview about breaking’s inclusion in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games,” she said, about herself.

“Less than an hour later, she was on ABC News 24 answering questions about breaking terminology, its athletic prowess, whether it is a ‘dance’ or a ‘sport’ and Australia’s international standing.”

You can be certain she had planned to turn her joke of an Olympics performance into some sort of paper on one of the aforementioned academic buzzwords.

But while Raygun might have liked the media’s initial attention, she wasn’t a fan of the media’s right to choose its own angles.

Like any good cultural Marxist academic, she complained that journalists would often “distort” the truth and turn the sport into a joke.

“Her fellow breakers around the country who were similarly inundated with media requests shared these experiences, and in a few cases their well-intentioned interviews were turned into a gag for Australian audiences to laugh at the notion of breaking being an Olympic sport,” she wrote.

“That some media workers distort or exclude parts of an interview to fit their own programming goals and requirements is by no means unique to this situation.”

Millions of people have seen the Raygun’s Olympic debut. Picture: AFP

Yes, it is the media to blame for breakdancing being funny at the Olympics.

It surely has nothing to do with a contestant doing the sprinkler and hopping around like a kangaroo.

This story may be on the more absurd side of academic headlines, but it is certainly no outlier.

Any university that seeks to publish this kind of work raises serious questions about its credibility.

These are institutions which have been lobbying hard against the Labor Government’s plan to cap foreign students to ease cost of living burdens.

Universities Australia chief executive Luke Sheehy has been doing the rounds on TV and across print making the argument that up to 14,000 jobs could be lost by the policies.

If some of these jobs include academics like Raygun, they have no business being propped up by universities and taxpayers who are unwittingly left with the bill.

Jack Houghton is Digital Editor at Sky News.