Forced to Care

But an infrastructure of care is also about imagining — and enacting — more robust and informal communities of care.

Most essentially, it’s about treating child and elder care as infrastructure: absolutely essential to the health of society, and deserving of holistic reforms that treat it as such.

it doesn’t have to be this way. We can create infrastructures of care — on both a societal and community level.

the politics of inevitability: there’s a palpable feeling of resignation and a paucity of imagination when it comes to what care could look like.

And so the care crisis keeps deepening — and will continue to do so, so long as we continue to treat a systemic problem as private responsibility.

The experience is often so traumatic and exhausting that once they’re out of the thick of it, they don’t want anything to do with the ongoing struggle. There’s sympathy for others, but very little solidarity.

For so many people, this lack of options — this coercion to care — breeds intense resentment of a role that, when chosen of one’s own volition, might feel incredibly satisfying.

Within the individualist conception, there’s no such thing as a systemic issue: no eldercare crisis, no childcare crisis, just hard decisions and sacrifices that every family (read: every woman in that family) has to make on their own. If another family or individual can’t make similar decisions, t hat’s their problem, and no one else’s.

our most venerated heroes are those who (ostensibly) “did it themselves,” even if they absolutely did it, whatever it is, with the invisibilized labor of women, or exploitative and racialized labor practices, or the benefits of familial wealth.