Evan Mitchell Schares
Biographic Data
| ID | 4078723 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Evan Mitchell Schares |
| GIVEN NAMES | Evan Mitchell |
| FAMILY NAME | Schares |
| SIGNATURE | SCHARES E M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Villanova University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3163-6987 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Witnessing Refusal
This essay presents a six-week ethnographic study of The Thread, a participatory installation art project installed in Vernon Park in Philadelphia’s predominantly Black Germantown neighborhood in the summer of 2024. Framed by its creators as a sacred space for collective grief, the installation invited parkgoers to engage with a disconnected rotary phone to talk to the deceased and contribute to a memorial mosaic. Yet across 60 hours of fieldwork…
Chaotic self-portraiture and precarious sound media in Toshi Makihara’s free improvisation in becoming the sound
Amnesic performance
Mop Water Performance
This essay proffers the author’s 2018 staged production of Gloryfire in the HopKins Black Box Theatre as a case study in the staging of experimental mop water performance. Mop water performance is a creative and embodied method of critical inquiry that animates feminist and queer storytelling, poetry, and polemic on the stage. Drawing from the author’s directorial and devising experience, this essay offers dirty mop water as a theoretically infor…
Staging and intertextualizing Franz Kafka’s “in the penal colony”
In 2022, I adapted for the stage Franz Kafka's 1914 short story "In the Penal Colony" and intertextualized the text with devised narratives about the body in pain. I theorize both the staged performance and this reflexive essay as a method of embodied intertextual resistance within literary performance practice to unearth the relationships between performance and writing, body and machine, and the page and the stage. I highlight three moments of …
Storying the Repertoire
In this essay, I theorize my 2022 site-specific performance at 604 Iberville Street in New Orleans as a case study in slow and backward queer storytelling performance. In my performance, I embody logics of intimacy to story the 1973 arson attack at the Upstairs Lounge which resulted in the death of 32 queer people, which at the time was the largest single loss of queer life on U.S. soil. I champion queer storytelling performance as a viable and w…
U.S. homonationalist battle portraiture and queer armed archival artifacts
This article engages the photographic collection archived in Evan Bachner’s At Ease: Navy Men of World War II. I argue that this archive embodies myriad homonationalist intimacies through the reinforcement of historical images of White U.S. American queer-coded masculinity. I place its representations against a backdrop of global pornographic militarism, U.S. imperialism, and intimate Black refusal
Witnessing the archive
This essay animates witnessing as method to engage the performance historicity constellating the photographic archive of Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014). The archive resists historical white representations of queer activism prior to and during the Stonewall rebellion by telling the story of a Black butch lesbian drag king, Stormé DeLarverie, whose archival presence glimmers with queer acts of resistance and wondrous aesthetic performance. By witne…
The Suicide of Leelah Alcorn
In this article, I examine public discourse in the wake of transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn’s suicide. I argue that Alcorn’s politicized suicide beckoned a national tragedy whereas the slew of queer and transgender people of color murdered did not because of the repeated deployments of a whiteness-derived innocence. Performances of hegemonic grief evinced Alcorn’s posthumous rhetorical agency in ways that caused responsible adults to take actio…
Witnessing the archive
This essay animates witnessing as method to engage the performance historicity constellating the photographic archive of Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014). The archive resists historical white representations of queer activism prior to and during the Stonewall rebellion by telling the story of a Black butch lesbian drag king, Stormé DeLarverie, whose archival presence glimmers with queer acts of resistance and wondrous aesthetic performance. By witne…
Storying the Repertoire
In this essay, I theorize my 2022 site-specific performance at 604 Iberville Street in New Orleans as a case study in slow and backward queer storytelling performance. In my performance, I embody logics of intimacy to story the 1973 arson attack at the Upstairs Lounge which resulted in the death of 32 queer people, which at the time was the largest single loss of queer life on U.S. soil. I champion queer storytelling performance as a viable and w…
The Suicide of Leelah Alcorn
In this article, I examine public discourse in the wake of transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn’s suicide. I argue that Alcorn’s politicized suicide beckoned a national tragedy whereas the slew of queer and transgender people of color murdered did not because of the repeated deployments of a whiteness-derived innocence. Performances of hegemonic grief evinced Alcorn’s posthumous rhetorical agency in ways that caused responsible adults to take actio…
The Suicide of Leelah Alcorn
In this article, I examine public discourse in the wake of transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn’s suicide. I argue that Alcorn’s politicized suicide beckoned a national tragedy whereas the slew of queer and transgender people of color murdered did not because of the repeated deployments of a whiteness-derived innocence. Performances of hegemonic grief evinced Alcorn’s posthumous rhetorical agency in ways that caused responsible adults to take actio…
Witnessing the archive
This essay animates witnessing as method to engage the performance historicity constellating the photographic archive of Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014). The archive resists historical white representations of queer activism prior to and during the Stonewall rebellion by telling the story of a Black butch lesbian drag king, Stormé DeLarverie, whose archival presence glimmers with queer acts of resistance and wondrous aesthetic performance. By witne…
U.S. homonationalist battle portraiture and queer armed archival artifacts
This article engages the photographic collection archived in Evan Bachner’s At Ease: Navy Men of World War II. I argue that this archive embodies myriad homonationalist intimacies through the reinforcement of historical images of White U.S. American queer-coded masculinity. I place its representations against a backdrop of global pornographic militarism, U.S. imperialism, and intimate Black refusal
Staging and intertextualizing Franz Kafka’s “in the penal colony”
In 2022, I adapted for the stage Franz Kafka's 1914 short story "In the Penal Colony" and intertextualized the text with devised narratives about the body in pain. I theorize both the staged performance and this reflexive essay as a method of embodied intertextual resistance within literary performance practice to unearth the relationships between performance and writing, body and machine, and the page and the stage. I highlight three moments of …
Storying the Repertoire
In this essay, I theorize my 2022 site-specific performance at 604 Iberville Street in New Orleans as a case study in slow and backward queer storytelling performance. In my performance, I embody logics of intimacy to story the 1973 arson attack at the Upstairs Lounge which resulted in the death of 32 queer people, which at the time was the largest single loss of queer life on U.S. soil. I champion queer storytelling performance as a viable and w…
Mop Water Performance
This essay proffers the author’s 2018 staged production of Gloryfire in the HopKins Black Box Theatre as a case study in the staging of experimental mop water performance. Mop water performance is a creative and embodied method of critical inquiry that animates feminist and queer storytelling, poetry, and polemic on the stage. Drawing from the author’s directorial and devising experience, this essay offers dirty mop water as a theoretically infor…
Chaotic self-portraiture and precarious sound media in Toshi Makihara’s free improvisation in becoming the sound
Amnesic performance
Witnessing Refusal
This essay presents a six-week ethnographic study of The Thread, a participatory installation art project installed in Vernon Park in Philadelphia’s predominantly Black Germantown neighborhood in the summer of 2024. Framed by its creators as a sacred space for collective grief, the installation invited parkgoers to engage with a disconnected rotary phone to talk to the deceased and contribute to a memorial mosaic. Yet across 60 hours of fieldwork…
History (5 works) · Art (4 works) · History (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Queer (3 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (2 works) · Gender Studies (2 works) · Law (2 works)