Abstract

This article argues that most of the female characters in the early novels of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa conform either to the category of a sex object, or a “sexy mother figure.” Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the construction of images of femaleness and maleness in Vargas Llosa’s novels becomes more complex. The article assesses in detail the construction of the strong female protagonists of the novels La Fiesta del Chivo (2000), El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) and Travesuras de la Niña Mala (2006). It contends that Vargas Llosa at first finds it necessary to desexualize his female protagonists in order to enable them to act in the public sphere. This desexualization is partly overcome in the second of the three novels and disappears in the third. The article evaluates how these developments are related to the construction of maleness in Vargas Llosa’s later novels.

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