(De)Militarized Domesticity: Reconfiguring Marriage, Gender, and Family among Filipino Navy Couples

Through sixty in-depth interviews conducted with immigrant Filipino Navy families in San Diego, California between 2004 and 2005, it is examined how the U.S. military, as a colonial institution, transformed conceptions of race, gender, and family and reconfigured these structures by regulating and authorizing certain notions of intimacy, marriage, motherhood/fatherhood, and family life based on an ideal of white bourgeois domesticity. It is argued that the family construct that promotes social and cultural citizenship for Filipino Navy families can potentially destabilize the U.S. military institution. [Author]