Opportunity, Pleasure, and Risk

Using ethnographic data generated in Southwest Britain and an embodied social paradigm, this article explores the opportunities, pleasures, and risks attendant to urban male heterosexualities. Participant observation and informal ethnographic interviews with nightclub security staff, or “doormen,” contextualize and embody abstract and sterile risk discourses and knowledges. Although careful to avoid a pathologizing biomedical perspective, several social risks are identified, which may amplify or minimize the conditions of possibility for HIV transmission. These include risks to existing intimate relationships and ontological security, violence, and embarrassment.