Starch: Faultless Premium Spray Starch

Abstract

An exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family provides a springboard from which to investigate spray starch. The exhibit elicits recollections of military ironing as a masculine labor of precision, rather than unskilled feminized work. A starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion of race- and gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. Braiding together the military roots of this Cold War–technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched militarized masculinity. This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.