Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Our special issue approaches knowledge as a product of intermingled sensory experiences in ways that confound neat divisions of body/mind, exterior/interior, subject/object, cognition, emotion, and imagination. Rejecting “cognitive ocularcentrism,” as well as approaches that focus on any single sense, we articulate an intersensorial framework premised on the entanglement of touch with other senses, particularly sight. Through this, we highlight hidden epistemic multiplicities, intersubjectivities, and literary strategies for the study of gender in the history of science, especially in reference to the gendering of personae and emotions. The putative rise of the visual in modern science was always already intersensorial, no matter how much cognitive ocularcentrism sought to tame this. By attending to seeming distractions within knowledge production, our issue seeks to reintegrate science back into the immersive flow of intersensorial experience and recover the sensuous webs that connect actors, geographies, fields, and time periods habitually separated.