Since the Biden administration released its infrastructure proposal, a semantic debate has arisen around a specific provision: the $400 billion in spending for at-home care for the elderly and disabled.
The conceptualization of visiting nurses as infrastructure—definitionally, the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society—has struck some as cynical, even offensive—an attempt to use a politically popular label to smuggle through a much broader agenda. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted a graphic that featured the $400 billion figure in an ugly black-and-yellow scheme, set against an ominously blurry legislative document. "President Biden's proposal is about anything but infrastructure." Even some prominent allies of the president, such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, stopped short of defending care work as infrastructure. "There's this semantic debate that's opening up," Buttigieg said on MSNBC. "To me it's a little bit besides the point … If it's a good policy, vote for it and call it whatever you like."
Once marginal, the idea that care work is infrastructure has been embraced by feminists across the political spectrum. The Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici advanced the notion...
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