“True Heart”: Reimagining Transnational Subjects through Sentimentality in Velina Hasu Houston’s Plays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines the political viability of empathy when we imagine interracial intimacies in women’s theatre. Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s notions of “national sentimentality” and the “intimate public,” I argue that Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea (1981) and Kokoro (1994) complicate our usual understanding of theatrical empathy. These plays restage familiar spectacles of racial suffering through the sentimental rhetoric and conventions of melodrama in order to enable cross-racial identifications between Japanese women and presumably white, female audiences. Simultaneously, they challenge the universalizing impulse of such falsely imagined affective alliances by exposing racial stereotypes and highlighting the limits of the viewers’ empathic desires. By reading these plays as creating a female cultural space – one in which affective mutuality is believed to transcend material differences – I interrogate the contingencies and pseudo-political dimensions of theatre’s feeling work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".