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“You can do that for a living?”
That was the typical response to Dr Rachael “Raygun” Gunn when she told people about her career, she said before her much-maligned Paris Olympics debut.
Gunn, however, can no longer say she studies “performance of hyper-masculinity in breaking … and aesthetics of hip hop culture and sport in Australia” after being made redundant from Macquarie University this week.
Gunn came to global prominence after the 2024 Games, where her kangaroo hops, contorting and Australia tracksuit failed to garner a single point from the judges as the sport made its Olympic debut.
“I wanted to do something artistic and creative. How many chances do you get in a lifetime to do something on the international stage? It was important to me, from that sense, to do the performance that I did.”
She rapidly became a meme and then the biggest story of the Games – an Australian dancer-turned-professor whose bizarre stylings saw her eliminated at the first stage of the competition.
Gunn may well be the only female Australian breaker to ever dance at the Olympics, as the event has not been included on the schedule for Los Angeles 2028.
“I wanted to make an impression in a different way,” she told reporters after her event.
“My chances were always very slim, but I still worked my butt off to try to represent the best that I could.”
Gunn’s significant research output included papers titled “Nocturnal Paradox: How Breakdancing reveals the potentials of the night”, “Re-articulating Gender Norms through breakdancing” and “The ‘systems of relay’ in doing cultural studies: experimenting with the ‘Body without Organs’ in b-girling practice.”
Gunn had been at Macquarie since she completed her undergraduate degree more than a decade ago; she has been lecturing on media and cultural studies there for the past five years.
Gunn’s redundancy comes as the university’s arts department makes wide-ranging cuts, which vice chancellor Bruce Dowton told a parliamentary inquiry earlier this month were not unfairly focused on the faculty.
“A number of things were taken into account as we move towards proposing changes … funding model changes, regulatory environment, international student downturn and so on – but also the reality that the demand for courses in the Faculty of Arts has changed,” he said.
The chair of the inquiry, Dr Sarah Kaine, raised concerns about “sham redundancies” within the Faculty of Arts because a number of courses that had previously been taught by a staff member who took a redundancy are now being taught by casuals.
In 2024, Gunn again made headlines when she demanded $10,000 from a Sydney comedy club set to stage Raygun the Musical.
Gunn was contacted for comment. Macquarie University said it was unable to comment on “confidential employment arrangements”.
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