Post-Postfeminist Witnessing : Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”

Abstract

«Rondine al Nido» is part of the Nevada-based first short story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, «Battleborn» (2012). The third-person narrator focuses on a woman in her thirties who recounts her lover the experience of being sexually abused when she ran away at sixteen years old with a former friend to Las Vegas. Set in the backdrop of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the story dwells on the moment when the two girls could have escaped from the hotel room of their abusers but decided not to. The embedded story exemplifies Rosalind Gill’s idea of the late 1990s and early 2000s postfeminism (2008), and compliance with male standards of a pornified sexual experience (Nikunen 2007). Iargue that the use of temporality in the story allows for a revision of gender demands and stereotypes reinforced through nationalistic discourses surrounding 9/11, and foregrounds a «crisis ordinariness» (Berlant 2011: 10) with regards to sexual violence. Further, understanding the act of the telling as an ethical encounter with the Other allows the narrator to come to terms with her younger self and the friend whom she did not protect from sexual violence in the past.