(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, I examine 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. I argue that the family construct that promotes social and cultural citizenship for Filipino Navy families can potentially destabilize the U.S. military institution.