Forced to Care

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

This line of thinking is a pretty obvious patriarchal tent pole — but it also does a lot of work upholding the American cult of the individual (family). If someone needs help, if someone’s in crisis, if someone’s struggling, the solution to their struggle should always be to turn inward, not outward.

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

What we have, then, is a caregiving paradigm — not just for kids, but for elders and other adults — that relies heavily on proximity to family and presumed willingness. For those without those things, there are two options: 1) pay a lot of money for help, or 2) figure it out your damn self.

In her excellent book Forced to Care, Evelyn Nakano Glenn refers to this ongoing scenario as a care crisis. It’s not just that there isn’t enough care — it’s that those who end up providing it are coerced, in some form, to do so.

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.

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.

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.

There’s coercion through kinship ties — aka, the person in need of care is my father, or my Aunt, or my kid, and it is my responsibility to provide it for them, even if I don’t particularly want to or am even able to.