Melissa Ames
Biographic Data
| ID | 328359 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa Ames |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa |
| FAMILY NAME | Ames |
| SIGNATURE | AMES M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aberystwyth University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1363-2758 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Gesture, Dance, and Learning Disability
Dance created by learning disabled dancers makes use of gesture as a medium that, through a combination of abstraction and mimesis, moves dancers of varying abilities and capacities towards communication with audiences. Learning disabled dancers produce aesthetic value that emerges from their decision to assemble and mobilize. Such movements towards a concatenation of capacities and communication create aesthetics and interrogate the politics of …
Archiving affect and activism
On 21 January 2017, over three million women participated in the Women’s March throughout the U.S., one day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. This article investigates the digital component of this historic protest as a powerful moment of hashtag feminism, one that exemplifies the vital role of affect in contributing to social change. Through qualitative analysis of 2,600 #WhyIMarch tweets from the day of the March, we identify the rhe…
Learning disability dance
This article argues that making dance performance is a resourceful means of self-production that is an aspect of resilience, through interrelationship, and that making dance is an act of resilience in the context of the social, cultural, and historical struggle that continues in the lives of people with learning disabilities. The argument is made by developing dance scholar Randy Martin’s theory of mobilisation in relation to Catherine Panter-Bri…
Renegotiating resilience, redefining resourcefulness
Applied theatre and performance practice offers persuasive illustrations of the ways in which dominant conceptions of resilience and resourcefulness – frequently aligned with neoliberal values – may be critiqued, challenged and displaced. As the contributions within this issue illustrate, such potential resides in a complex ecology of embodied knowledges and contested value, unfolding within located scenes of constraint and complicity. By drawing…
Emptiness as material for devised theatre performance
The article examines the ways in which failure operated in the devising process with a colleague with learning disabilities. Themes of collaboration, co-creativity and power relations are set within the account of a process between the author and a research participant with learning and physical disabilities. The postdramatic device of failure within theatrical performance is set against the predicament that a person with learning disabilities fa…
Serializing age
The epidemic of gendered ageism plaguing Hollywood has been well attended to in recent years, with various actresses speaking out against the unfair practices that negatively impact the careers of
Capel
This article is a record of conversations held between Margaret Ames and Mike Pearson during the creation and performance of a site-specific theatre project made by Cyrff Ystwyth and directed by Ames. Cyrff Ystwyth are a company of people with and without learning disabilities. The performance, Capel: The Lights Are On, was made by Adrian Jones, a company member with learning disabilities and was his response to research questions that formed the…
Where Have All the Good Men Gone
It is commonplace in cultural studies to claim that everything is constructed. Therefore, to state with an air of certainty that fatherhood is a constructed role formed from the images and expectations of any given society at any given time would hardly surprise many. In fact, the argument itself is not new. Luigi Zoja, the former President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, has studied the figure of the father and argued…
Time in Television Narrative
Criminal consequences of childhood sexual victimization
Effects of victim's and defendant's physical attractiveness on the perception of responsibility in an ambiguous domestic violence case
Legal, social, and biological definitions of pedophilia
Sexual orientation of human offspring may be altered by severe maternal stress during pregnancy
To test the hypotheses that maternal stress during pregnancy may alter the sexual orientation of offspring, 285 women with offspring 19 years of age and older provided retrospective accounts of stressful experiences they had, beginning 12 months prior to pregnancy up to the point of giving birth, and indicated how severe they recalled each event being. When weighted according to severity, stressful experiences helped to predict sexual orientation…
Sexual orientation as a continuous variable
Neurohormonal functioning and sexual orientation
Following a historical sketch of attempts to explain homosexuality, we review evidence indicating that the process of determining human sexual orientation is fundamentally the same in all mammals. In this process, four phenotypic dimensions of sexuality develop from two more or less distinct sex genotypes. Studies are reviewed that indicate how phenotypic deviations from these two genotypes (called sexual inversions) can occur. The causes of sexu…
Neurohormonal functioning and sexual orientation
Following a historical sketch of attempts to explain homosexuality, we review evidence indicating that the process of determining human sexual orientation is fundamentally the same in all mammals. In this process, four phenotypic dimensions of sexuality develop from two more or less distinct sex genotypes. Studies are reviewed that indicate how phenotypic deviations from these two genotypes (called sexual inversions) can occur. The causes of sexu…
Sexual orientation as a continuous variable
Sexual orientation of human offspring may be altered by severe maternal stress during pregnancy
To test the hypotheses that maternal stress during pregnancy may alter the sexual orientation of offspring, 285 women with offspring 19 years of age and older provided retrospective accounts of stressful experiences they had, beginning 12 months prior to pregnancy up to the point of giving birth, and indicated how severe they recalled each event being. When weighted according to severity, stressful experiences helped to predict sexual orientation…
Legal, social, and biological definitions of pedophilia
Serializing age
The epidemic of gendered ageism plaguing Hollywood has been well attended to in recent years, with various actresses speaking out against the unfair practices that negatively impact the careers of
Where Have All the Good Men Gone
It is commonplace in cultural studies to claim that everything is constructed. Therefore, to state with an air of certainty that fatherhood is a constructed role formed from the images and expectations of any given society at any given time would hardly surprise many. In fact, the argument itself is not new. Luigi Zoja, the former President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, has studied the figure of the father and argued…
Effects of victim's and defendant's physical attractiveness on the perception of responsibility in an ambiguous domestic violence case
Sexual orientation as a continuous variable
Neurohormonal functioning and sexual orientation
Following a historical sketch of attempts to explain homosexuality, we review evidence indicating that the process of determining human sexual orientation is fundamentally the same in all mammals. In this process, four phenotypic dimensions of sexuality develop from two more or less distinct sex genotypes. Studies are reviewed that indicate how phenotypic deviations from these two genotypes (called sexual inversions) can occur. The causes of sexu…
Sexual orientation of human offspring may be altered by severe maternal stress during pregnancy
To test the hypotheses that maternal stress during pregnancy may alter the sexual orientation of offspring, 285 women with offspring 19 years of age and older provided retrospective accounts of stressful experiences they had, beginning 12 months prior to pregnancy up to the point of giving birth, and indicated how severe they recalled each event being. When weighted according to severity, stressful experiences helped to predict sexual orientation…
Effects of victim's and defendant's physical attractiveness on the perception of responsibility in an ambiguous domestic violence case
Legal, social, and biological definitions of pedophilia
Criminal consequences of childhood sexual victimization
Time in Television Narrative
Where Have All the Good Men Gone
It is commonplace in cultural studies to claim that everything is constructed. Therefore, to state with an air of certainty that fatherhood is a constructed role formed from the images and expectations of any given society at any given time would hardly surprise many. In fact, the argument itself is not new. Luigi Zoja, the former President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, has studied the figure of the father and argued…
Capel
This article is a record of conversations held between Margaret Ames and Mike Pearson during the creation and performance of a site-specific theatre project made by Cyrff Ystwyth and directed by Ames. Cyrff Ystwyth are a company of people with and without learning disabilities. The performance, Capel: The Lights Are On, was made by Adrian Jones, a company member with learning disabilities and was his response to research questions that formed the…
Serializing age
The epidemic of gendered ageism plaguing Hollywood has been well attended to in recent years, with various actresses speaking out against the unfair practices that negatively impact the careers of
Emptiness as material for devised theatre performance
The article examines the ways in which failure operated in the devising process with a colleague with learning disabilities. Themes of collaboration, co-creativity and power relations are set within the account of a process between the author and a research participant with learning and physical disabilities. The postdramatic device of failure within theatrical performance is set against the predicament that a person with learning disabilities fa…
Archiving affect and activism
On 21 January 2017, over three million women participated in the Women’s March throughout the U.S., one day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. This article investigates the digital component of this historic protest as a powerful moment of hashtag feminism, one that exemplifies the vital role of affect in contributing to social change. Through qualitative analysis of 2,600 #WhyIMarch tweets from the day of the March, we identify the rhe…
Learning disability dance
This article argues that making dance performance is a resourceful means of self-production that is an aspect of resilience, through interrelationship, and that making dance is an act of resilience in the context of the social, cultural, and historical struggle that continues in the lives of people with learning disabilities. The argument is made by developing dance scholar Randy Martin’s theory of mobilisation in relation to Catherine Panter-Bri…
Renegotiating resilience, redefining resourcefulness
Applied theatre and performance practice offers persuasive illustrations of the ways in which dominant conceptions of resilience and resourcefulness – frequently aligned with neoliberal values – may be critiqued, challenged and displaced. As the contributions within this issue illustrate, such potential resides in a complex ecology of embodied knowledges and contested value, unfolding within located scenes of constraint and complicity. By drawing…
Gesture, Dance, and Learning Disability
Dance created by learning disabled dancers makes use of gesture as a medium that, through a combination of abstraction and mimesis, moves dancers of varying abilities and capacities towards communication with audiences. Learning disabled dancers produce aesthetic value that emerges from their decision to assemble and mobilize. Such movements towards a concatenation of capacities and communication create aesthetics and interrogate the politics of …
Psychology (13 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Medicine (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Developmental psychology (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works)