Circling towards intimacy: Trees, tactile reading and ecosexual non-human companionship

Abstract

Adopting a fresh approach to autoethnographic writing, this article unfurls tactile encounters with the more-than-human through an active exercise in readership. Situating this within ecosexual and psycho-somatic framings, the text queers kinaesthetic encounter, presenting it as holding the potential for deeper connection, understanding and amity across species. Drawing on Konik and Konik’s notion of a ‘barefoot epistemology’ (: 80), and an overlay of sensorial, critical and reflective writing, the structure of the essay enacts a mimesis of the author’s own kinaesthetic encounter, exploring the provision of research writing to offer the reader their own embodied experience. Questions of research materiality support an enlivened research encounter.