The Department of Gender Studies
2015-2016 Public Lecture Series
presents
Janice M. Irvine
Mapping the Walk of Shame: Putting Affect into Theory and Methods
The “walk of shame” is a term in the U.S. that refers to a woman’s walk home after a night of hookup sex. In this talk, I discuss my research on the walk of shame, which found the persistence, but just as importantly, the instability both of dominant gendered sexual norms and in the power of shame to police them. In this study, I expanded the concept of sexual scripts and the cognitive mapping method by adding an emotional dimension to both. I will discuss conceptual and methodological challenges posed by sociology’s affective turn, and explore possibilities for incorporating an affective dimension into social research.
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Janice Irvine is a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts. She has worked as an activist and scholar in the area of sexuality studies for several decades. She is the author of Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States (University of California Press) as well as numerous other books and articles about sexuality and politics. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in both Croatia and Romania, and is studying queer politics in the Balkans.