This article aims to study the signals of virility in Rubem Fonseca’s short stories “A revista ou a força”, “A força humana” and “O desempenho”, published in the first three short story books of the author, in the 1960s. For the analysis of this trilogy, theorists on masculinity and virility, such as Bourdieu (1999), Machado (2004) and Courtine (2013), were used to investigate how these aspects are present in the narratives. It was observed that, in the short stories, the signs of virility are linked to processes of identification, stylization and beliefs, all of them being impregnated by ironic marks constituted by the potency/ impotence paradox, especially in the scope of the protagonist. In the end, it was concluded that the approach of Rubem Fonseca’s work from this perspective has been promising and that the academic discussion of virility is a political necessity at the present time.