ABSTRACT
Intimacy can be understood in a range of ways, illustrated by the diversity of understandings of intimacy. This chapter offers a reading of intimacy that extends beyond exclusively human realms and suggests ways of thinking about intimacy in interspecies and more-than-human research contexts. It begins with a discussion of defining intimacy: as the emotional bonds, ruptures and responses experienced by and among nonhuman beings. The chapter argues that attention to these forms of intimacy in other species is a site through which to develop intimacy in feminist research; that is, intimacy between feminist researchers and the subjects they study, whether those subjects are human or nonhuman. It considers particular research practices that would foster entangled empathy, those which call for a slower form of scholarship. Intimacy experienced by members of other species can be understood, in part, through scholarship on animal emotion and cognition. Intimacy as a form of research practice takes time.
