Ruhls of the House: Surreal Spaces for Queer Homes in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Sarah Ruhl’s plays In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, The Clean House, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage as examples of a dramaturgically queered approach to the American household drama. My argument involves close readings of portions of the texts associated with the physical set and the emotional connections among the characters through the lens of queer theory. I first trace the lineage of the families and set designs that define this subcategory of drama, highlighting the relationship between physical form and cultural content. I contend that the household sets that accompany the canonical works of family drama have created a parallel between the structures we see on stage in these plays and the kinds of (normative) families we expect to encounter inside. Citing these predecessors in both the visual and emotional landscape of her plays, Ruhl in her works then tears both the physical houses and normative boundaries of families asunder. The result is an expanded concept of what a house and home can do and mean in the world today.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".