ABSTRACT
Lady Gaga opened her performance at the 2009 MTV video awards with an operatic incantation: ‘Amidst all of these fl ashing lights, I pray the fame won’t take my life,’ she sang, evoking the danger and violent potential of fame, a theme that underscores much of her work to date. The performance continued with Gaga alternately prostrate on the ground, clawing her way towards her audience, or dancing in an aggressive and confrontational manner. Halfway through the number, Gaga began walking with a crutch, while an erratically moving dancer was wheeled onstage in a wheelchair, and was spun around several times before being whisked away almost as quickly as she appeared. By the end of the performance, Gaga was bleeding from her midsection, strung up from the ceiling, incapacitated, possibly dead. This macabre mise-en-scene, rife with representations of disability, was a surreal setting for a performance of Gaga’s 2009 single ‘Paparazzi’. It came in the wake of her video for the same song, which o ered a similar narrative of bodily compromise; and of a set of promotional photos by photographer David LaChapelle, featuring Gaga thrown from a wheelchair, hooked up to an electroshock therapy treatment device, and presiding over a post-apocalyptic cityscape, knees askew and on crutches.1 These visual references to disability peppered Gaga’s work in late 2009, in ways that construct fame/celebrity as a disabling force.
