After the Lovedeath is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to the their nineteenth-century sources. He draws on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.

Kramer explores this fatal normality in the self-contradictions of masculinity, the shifting alignments of femininity, authority, and desire, and the interdependency of hetero- and homosexuality. At the same time, he offers glimpses of a saving counter-normality through which gender can free itself from a rigid system of polarities.