Conference Agenda

“Crip time,” understood as the centering of the temporality of disabled bodies and minds and the possibilities conjured by doing so, has been used within disability studies to analyze works within a variety of media. As Sonia Loftis notes in a crip time analysis of Shakespeare, experiencing time differently can be central to the neurodivergent experience. I argue that thinking in crip time offers opportunities for analyzing repetition in music from the positionality of the autistic listener. As an example, I offer a crip time reading of the repetitions in the final movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 informed by my personal experience. Such a reading does not reject but may add an additional layer to traditional, historically-informed interpretations of the non-normative passage of time and repetitions within the piece.

Musicologists have used non-normative music as a metaphor for neurodivergent experience. For example, Joseph Straus observes that modernism in music includes a celebration of the unconventional aesthetic, which is especially open to a reading through a lens of disability. Drawing on hermeneutic analysis and on research ranging from Michael Bakan’s ethnographic work to Katie Overy and Istvan Molnar-Szakacs’s work on music perception, this paper uses crip time as a means to go beyond using musical style to represent disability, focusing instead on the experience–both drastic and gnostic–of the crip listener.

Stefani Germonatta, AKA Lady Gaga, is known for her use and exploitation of queerness and disability in her performances. Lady Gaga has centered much of her artistic work around being different, othered, or monstrous (Cleary 2017). By examining Lady Gaga’s performance of disability across her 18+ year-long career, this paper shows that her display of disability as couture is problematic, performative, and authentic.

I focus on three key performances in Lady Gaga’s oeuvre: her 2009 VMA performance of “Paparazzi,” the 2017 feature-length film-biography “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” and the 2025-26 Mayhem Ball Tour performances of “Abracadabra.” For the performances of “Paparazzi” and “Abracadabra,” Gaga utilizes symbols of disability–a wheelchair, crutches, and a cane–as key visual props in her performance. In “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” Gaga opens her backstage (Goffmann 1959) to the public and lays bare her experience with fibromyalgia. These performances, as argued by Christopher Smit (2014), are what Tobin Siebers describes as “disability aesthetics." Disability Aesthetics is not simply the representation of disabled artists; it demonstrates that beautiful art can be grating, disgusting, uncomfortable, and painful (2006).

I argue that, in addition to Lady Gaga’s disability aesthetics, she employs camp aesthetics to further accentuate her departure from conventional beauty standards. Following Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964), Gaga’s performances follow Sontag’s tenth note: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp’...It is the farthest extension, in sensibility of the metaphor of life as theater.” Through the lens of disability and camp aesthetics, Lady Gaga performs “disability,” which allows her to be an exaggerated character of her authentic self and performatively represent the broader disabled community.

By combining disability and camp aesthetics, Lady Gaga uses live performance to enact her invisible disability in an exaggerated, playful, and artful manner. Lady Gaga embraces and performs her disability to resist the boundaries of pop music aesthetics.