This article expands the concept of sexual scripts and the cognitive mapping method by adding an emotional dimension to both. It is based on a case study of college students reporting their experiences of the walk of shame, the term for women walking home in the early morning from a “hookup,” or casual sex, the night before. The walk of shame is a productive site in which to address conceptual and methodological challenges posed by sociology’s affective turn. In this article, I discuss emotional scripts as a conceptual framework for exploring women students’ experiences with the walk of shame. And I propose affective mapping as a methodological approach for capturing emotional dimensions in social life. Using the method to map the emergence of feelings and their temporal changes in relation to normative features of the spatial environment, I suggest that although the walk of shame appears to be a vehicle for the social control of women’s sexuality, women report more complexity during their walks, producing scripts of shame, pride, and ambivalence.
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