I like to think of this volume as a form of radical intimacy—the kind of intimacy that happens when we allow ourselves to be open, to be touched, to be vulnerable in our expressions. Willing to reveal and to explore dimensions of our desire to know, of our seeking, of our being that are rarely sounded. Some forms of intimacy revive us, they reaffirm our visions, our truths, our shared humanity. Not all intimacies are pleasing; there are forced and coercive intimacies that assume a closeness to which we or others have not consented. The chapters in this volume lay bare this range of vulnerabilities, and they do so with tremendous courage and a willingness to expose themselves and the raw and sometimes unpleasant realities of human engagement.

intimate entanglements originally emerged out of a Society for Ethnomusicology conference panel (2013) exploring erotic subjectivity in ethnographic research. Those papers addressed the myriad ways that erotics and intimacies shape our experiences as field researchers, as scholars, and within and beyond our institutions. We argued that these dimensions of our epistemologies are crucial to the knowledge we produce and are also regulated by gatekeeping mechanisms institutionally and disciplinarily. The chapters in this volume expand on those original concerns, widening the scope and also deepening the theoretical interrogation of the multifaceted relationships between erotics, intimacy, and trauma as produced through sound, movement, and embodied experience.