This follow-up book to Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What’s Love got to Do with It (Palgrave, 2023) pivots on ideas around sex and love, including asking how looking at sex through the vantage of love offer us new ways of thinking critically about ethics and consent. The chapters collectively argue that literacy in love – particularly in relation to sex, consent, different forms of love, romance and sexual relationships – is shaped by individual and literary narratives, as well as institutional and societal frameworks. Across disciplines and methodologies, the contributions examine how love and sex are learned, mis-learned, silenced, or enforced, and how consent emerges as a foundational and often misunderstood concept which might even be connected to violence in intimate relationships – a topic that becomes increasingly emergent in our societies across the world.

Dr Madalena Grobbelaar is an academic at Edith Cowan University (ECU), a clinical psychologist and a clinical psychosexual therapist in private practice. Madalena, a co-founder of the #Love@ECU Research Network, is involved in research related to sexuality, love, intimate relationships, and interpersonal violence, areas she has published in.

Dr Elizabeth Reid Boyd is an academic in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. A co-founder of the #Love@ECU Research Network, her research explores gender and love. Widely published, her commentary features in The Conversation, The Guardian, Times Higher Education, and USA Today. She also writes internationally published fiction as Eliza Redgold.

Dr Debra Dudek’s research focuses on how texts communicate ethics and social justice issues. She is the author of The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them and a co-editor of Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What's Love Got to do With It?