“The First Line of Defense Is Our Home”: Settler Military Domesticity in World War II–Era Hawai‘i

This chapter examines the US military government’s focus on home economics, nutrition, mothering, and child care: these domestic projects included families of all races while also constructing the “secure” American family home over and against Asian immigrant family practices that did not meet these standards, and masking the persistence of Native Hawaiian food cultures and land-based epistemologies of health. Wartime domestic projects in Hawai‘i organized family life—as well as Hawai‘i’s role in the so-called American family—during a period when the political, military, and cultural incorporation of Hawai‘i and its diverse peoples into the US nation-state was strategically important to American foreign policy. Under martial law in Hawai‘i we can observe a logic of settler military domesticity: a particular iteration of patriotic femininity that fused the reproductive and affective labor of settler colonial homemaking with the production of US imperial war.