ABSTRACT This editors’ introduction provides an overview of the special issue of Amerasia Journal, “Rethinking Gendered Citizenship: Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire.” This introduction offers expansive definitions of intimacy to account for a fuller range of modes of belonging and connection beyond juridical and state-based frameworks. The contributions to the special issue draw from critical ethnic studies, indigenous studies, queer studies, trans studies, and gender studies to elaborate how intimate connections are consciously and unconsciously forged under multiple regimes of settler colonialism and empire, the connections forged across geographies and temporalities, complicate the meanings of inclusion and exclusion.