Risks and vulnerability at the banks of the São Francisco River: ethnography, writing and marginility

Abstract

This article analyzes the dynamics of risk and vulnerability within cruising practices along the banks of the São Francisco River, in Juazeiro, Bahia, drawing on an ethnographic approach developed over continuous and long-term fieldwork. The research examines how desire, precarity, and racialization shape sexual encounters in this territory, where anonymity and clandestinity operate both as protection and as threat, producing a scenario in which subjects constantly negotiate their presence and their limits. Based on ethnographic experience—built through prolonged participant observation, daily circulation along the trails, and situated conversations with frequenters—the study explores the ambivalence between pleasure and fear, desire and exclusion, highlighting how interactions are mediated by tacit codes of recognition that guide approaches, refusals, and strategies for managing risk. Frequenters negotiate their presence and interactions through discrete gestures and subtle bodily movements, adjusted to the material conditions of the space—lighting, flow of people, presence of police—and to the vulnerabilities inscribed in their bodies and trajectories. These modes of interaction reveal not only protective strategies but also specific dynamics in the constitution of desire, in which dimness and uncertainty intensify erotic experience. The article contributes to reflections on sexuality, territoriality, and vulnerability by showing how dissident practices are structured in contexts marked by racial and socioeconomic inequalities, thus expanding the understanding of marginal experiences and their methodological, ethical, and theoretical challenges within anthropological production.