This major collection explores the nature of love and eroticism, examining the ways in which erotic bodily pleasures have become central to contemporary consumer culture. Drawing on the work of feminists, sociologists and cultural theorists, it contains wide-ranging and accessible contributions to contemporary debates on sexuality, love and eroticism.

Love and Eroticism - Mike Featherstone An Introduction On the Postmodern Uses of Sex - Zygmunt Bauman The Sexual Citizen - Jeffrey Weeks On the Way to the Post-Familial Family - From a Community of Need to Elective Affinities - Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim On the Elementary Forms of Socioerotic Life - Sasha Weitman Bohemian Love - Elizabeth Wilson Otto Gross and Else Jaff[ac]e and Max Weber - Sam Whimster with Gottfried Heuer The Lost Innocence of Love - Eva Illouz Romance as a Postmodern Condition Balancing Sex and Love since the 1960′s Sexual Revolution - Cas Wouters Citysex - Henning Bech Representing Lust in Public Love and Structure - Charles Lindholm ′Falling in Love with Love is Falling for Make Believe′ - Mary Evans Ideologies of Romance in Post-Enlightenment Culture Introduction to Georg Simmel′s ′On the Sociology of the Family′ - David Frisby On the Sociology of the Family - Georg Simmel Sex and Sociality - Laura Rival, Don Slater and Daniel Miller Comparative Ethnographies of Sexual Objectification The Nazi Eye Code of Falling in Love - Andrew Travers Bright Eyes, Black Heart, Crazed Gaze ′On Me, Not In Me′ - Cindy Patton Locating Affect in Nationalism after AIDS Seductions of the Impossible - Michael Richardson Love, the Erotic and Sacrifice in Surrealist Discourse The Lesson of Fire - Maria Esther Maciel Notes on Love and Eroticism in Octavio Paz′s The Double Flame Love, Gender and Morality - Mike Hepworth Stephen Kern′s ′Eyes of Love′ Bodies, Sex and Death - Arthur W Frank