The introduction establishes the book’s anchoring concepts of infrastructural freedom dreaming, infrastructural violence, and interdependency, as well as its method of crip-of-color critique. It situates these concepts within conversations in feminist disability studies, feminist critiques of welfare reform, political economies of care, and contemporary American literary studies. Offering a political and historical overview of antiwelfare ideology in the United States, the introduction considers the emergence of dependency as a primary strategy to decimate social safety nets. It then examines the rival infrastructures of care envisioned by queer-of-color writers such as Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa and reframes dependency as a potential axis of affinity between anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist disability politics.