ABSTRACT
An analysis of and through the intimate, long an animating theme of feminist and queer sociologies, is now emerging as an explicit theoretical and empirical research space across disciplines. Arriving only lately in IR, the intimate is a site of intersection, threading together gender, sexuality, race, migration, and work—and offering a pointed critique of the categories, frames, methodologies, and concepts that colour mainstream disciplinary IR. This chapter reflects on the meaning of the intimate in IR and the normative, methodological, and conceptual critiques it presents, before exploring what these critiques might mean for central tenets of IR theory.
