The Inscription of Masculinity and Whiteness in the Autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract — This essay examines the interconnectedness of whiteness and heterosexual masculinity in the autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, EI pez en el agua [ A Fish in the Water ]. In this text Vargas Llosa critiques Peruvian racism and machismo, and in his self-portrait attempts to distance himself from the categories of whiteness and masculinity. But in so doing he in fact obscures the workings of race and gender not only in Peruvian society but in his own writing, where the self is implicitly asserted in opposition to an image of nature as the realm of the indigenous and the feminine.