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Hello everyone, welcome to my Padlet. In this curation you will find pieces of my Italian heritage combined with intersectionality principles and some tidbits from our readings in class. I hope all of you take something useful out of my Padlet and enjoy it.

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"You are late, you nappy-headed ho. What did you say? you ask, though you have heard every word.."
It is sad that people think its okay to speak to others like this. It is extremely disrespectful. This is part of the problem. Words have meaning and words can hurt.

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"Words work as release-- well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing"
What happens without words? Words are silent, they are deadly, they can mean different things to different people. Author Claudia Rankine uses her words to create An American Lyric. It is a combination of beautifully written words that are powerful. Words can change the world. Words need to be said to change the course of our world full of hate.

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The Chief Master Sergeant of The Air Force position is the highest position an enlisted member obtain. Chief Master Sergeant JoAnne Bass is the first female to serve in this position. This is a huge step for women in the military. Chief Bass has already made a difference for women who serve. Recently, women have been allowed to wear their hair in braids or a ponytail while in uniform. Previously women were only allowed to have their hair slicked back into a tight bun that caused pain and future hair loss. Chief Bass implemented this change and it was put into action this year. Chief Bass discusses how to be a fearless leader and has overcome self-doubt in her TedTalk.

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JoAnne S. Bass: What female military leadership can teach us about overcoming self-doubt

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What challenges arise for women climbing the ranks in leadership, and what can they do to overcome them? TED's current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers sits down with Chief Master Sergeant JoAnne S. Bass, the first woman in history to serve as the highest-ranking non-commissioned member of a US military service, for a look inside the Air Force and how she got to where she is today.

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This article had a lot of interesting information because I have always assumed men and women have different brains. My husband thinks different things are more important than the thing I think are important. I always thought that this is because he is programmed differently than me. Throughout the years researchers have failed to produce reliable information about the difference between men and women's brains. Brain size is dependent on body size, language processing is spread equally, and men are not any smarter than women. I think this inaccurate research contributes to the policies in this country that prevent women from succeeding as much as men do in life.

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I found this article one of the most thought-provoking in the class. It is so crazy how masculine policies in the United States are. Women are inherently at a disadvantage when it comes to running for office and getting into politics. We are still fighting for a voice. We want to be heard and our opinions to matter. According to the research done in the NY Times Article, "The word “she,” when referring to the future president, made people cognitively stumble, leading to a “considerable disruption” in reading time, said Titus von der Malsburg, another author of the study and a linguist at the University of Potsdam, in Germany." This is undeniable proof that women are at a disadvantage because their pronoun is not consciously considered when people are voting.

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A new study, which found that Americans were reluctant to use the word "she" to describe a hypothetical president, highlights the sneaky ways language illuminates bias.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar at an event for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Columbia, S.C., on Monday. Credit... Sam Wolfe/Reuters

It was a blip of a moment during the Democratic debate last week, one perhaps overshadowed by a long discussion of the prospect of a female president. Responding to a question about climate change, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, "I will do everything a president can do all by herself on the first day."

All by herself. Did you clock the use of that word?

A study released this month shows that you did - and that, in fact, it may have cost you a third of a second in reading time just now.

Her. It's a three-letter pronoun that, despite the seemingly endless debate over whether a woman can become president, feels relatively benign. But what if its use, or an unconscious aversion to its use, had some small power to influence voter perception? Could something as simple as a pronoun reflect, or even affect, the way voters understand power?

That's the question raised by the research, conducted by cognitive scientists and linguists at M.I.T., the University of Potsdam and the University of California, San Diego, who surveyed people during the run-up to the 2016 election. Wanting to understand how world events might influence language, the researchers hypothesized that the possibility a woman would be elected president at that time might override the implicit bias people had toward referring to the president as "he."

But what they found was that Americans - even young, self-identified Democratic women who believed Hillary Clinton would win - were reluctant to use "she" even in the context of a hypothetical president.

"There seemed to be a real bias against referring to the next president as 'she,'" said Roger Levy, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T. and one of the authors of the study.

When the researchers watched subjects in a reading setting - they were asked to read a short passage about the next president, pressing a button on a screen to reveal each word of the sentence - their bias was even more pronounced: The word "she," when referring to the future president, made people cognitively stumble, leading to a "considerable disruption" in reading time, said Titus von der Malsburg, another author of the study and a linguist at the University of Potsdam, in Germany.

"People had difficulties reading 'she' even if the text had previously used 'she,' showing how persistent and deeply ingrained this bias is," he said.

So could struggling to say or read the word "she" in the context of a president affect our willingness to vote for a woman?

"That's of course the million-dollar question," said Dr. von der Malsburg.

He noted that if people gravitated toward male language when talking about presidents, that could indirectly contribute to a culture in which women were not seen as typical candidates.

"And that, in turn, would likely influence election outcomes because women would have to do extra work to convince voters that they can do the job," he said.

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One of Ms. Warren's campaign trademarks is to ask girls for a pinky promise because running for president, she says, is "what girls do." Credit... Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

When it comes to women in politics - and specifically, women in the presidency - often lurking behind language are unconscious assumptions about women in power.

"We are uneasy with the president as 'she' because encountering it forces us to have in mind a new conception of 'president,'" the linguist Robin Lakoff said.

Dr. Lakoff, whose book "Language and Woman's Place" helped create the field of gender linguistics in the 1970s, said that language tended to reflect the beliefs of a particular moment in time.

But it can also shape them.

Research has found that the use of the pronoun "he" can create a male bias in readers, that countries with gendered language have higher gender inequality and that even subtly sexist language may influence voters' likelihood of supporting a particular candidate.

In recent years, some governments and organizations have started paying more attention to the power of words, taking steps to update or replace gendered terms.

In 2013, Washington State joined Florida and Minnesota in combing through its state codes and statutes to adjust terms like "ombudsman" (now " ombuds") to be gender neutral. As Liz Watson, then senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, said at the time: "Words matter. Words help shape our perceptions about what opportunities are available to women and men."

Administrators at Yale announced in 2017 that they would replace the words "freshman" and "upperclassman" with "first-year" and "upper-level" students, joining several other universities that have informally made the change. And the singular "they" - increasingly popular as both as substitute for "he or she" and as a gender-neutral pronoun for those who identify as nonbinary - was recently declared the " Word of the Decade " by the American Dialect Society.

That would seem like progress, said the historian Barbara J. Berg. Yet when it comes to the halls of power, she said, the masculine "remains the default in our language."

It is popular these days to tell the story of Abigail Adams, wife of the founding father John, who urged her husband in a letter in 1776 to "remember the ladies." Lesser known is that his reply, in a letter back, called her request "saucy." (The word "she," of course, does not appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence, nor does the word "woman.")

And while, over the years, words like "mailman," "policeman" and "stewardess" have been replaced with terms like "mail carrier," "police officer" and "flight attendant," there are still plenty of phrases for which "he" connotes power. Think "manning the command post," "maestro" or even "guy" as a way to describe expertise. "As in, 'He's a stats guy' or 'He's a policy guy,'" said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

The 2018 midterm elections broke all sorts of records - and a historic number of women ran for office and won - and yet they also provided ample opportunity to hear (and see) the phrase "freshman congresswoman." Doesn't it sound sort of funny?

Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, described how she had recently spoken with a group of female judges, some of whom recalled being referred to as "sir" when on the bench. Presumably, Dr. Tannen said, the speakers were nervous - and "sir" was an attempt to show respect.

"'Sir' is associated with respect to an extent that 'ma'am' is not," Dr. Tannen said, noting that she, too, had occasionally stumbled over such words.

Once, she recalled, at an event in which Michelle Obama was speaking, a friend remarked that "Dr. Biden" would also be in attendance.

"I thought to myself, 'Oh, I didn't know Joe Biden had a Ph.D.,'" she said. "And of course it was his wife, who I had met, and who I knew had a Ph.D. So even I do it, Dr. Tannen."

And then there's "Madam." During the 1970s, feminists fought for the adoption of a female equivalent of "Mr." - one that did not denote marital status - and were largely successful with the honorific "Ms." But male presidents in the United States are often addressed as "Mr. President," while a woman - if the way we refer to cabinet secretaries is any indication - would quite likely be "Madam President."

"'Madam' could be a term of respect, but it's also the head of a brothel," said Dr. Berg, the historian. "So it's like this constant subtle reminder of a woman's status."

Ms. Klobuchar after the Democratic debate in Des Moines this month. "We need a candidate who is actually going to bring people with her," she said. Credit... Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

But a new breed of candidates may be flipping that script.

During the recent Democratic debate, in addition to Ms. Warren's use of "herself" in reference to the next president on more than one occasion, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said in her closing statement, "We need a candidate who is actually going to bring people with her."

Senator Kamala Harris of California, who dropped out of the race late last year, often did the same when she was running. As California's first female attorney general, she sifted through the language that was written into the law - statutes referring to the attorney general as "he" or "his" - and changed them.

"I've always been very aware that when it comes to women holding leadership roles, we are sometimes asking people to see what they have not seen before," Ms. Harris said in an email. "As our government becomes more reflective of the people it represents and the voices at the table become more diverse, it is important for us to really check how we are creating and supporting an inclusive environment - and a big part of that is about how we use language."

Of course, one might argue there's something of a feedback loop: The language reflects the culture. The culture won't change until there is a winning candidate who upends the old biases. But those running for that spot may be impeded by the incessant talking about gender.

The researchers say the United Kingdom may provide an encouraging case study.

In 2017, they replicated the study there, in the lead-up to an election to determine the next prime minister.

Theresa May was prime minister at the time and was expected to win - but she was not the first woman to hold that post. (That was Margaret Thatcher.)

When referring to the next prime minister, the British study participants were more likely to use the pronoun "she" than "he."

Sharon Attia contributed research.

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She's the Next President. Wait, Did You Read That Right? (Published 2020)

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A new study, which found that Americans were reluctant to use the word "she" to describe a hypothetical president, highlights the sneaky ways language illuminates bias. It was a blip of a moment during the Democratic debate last week, one perhaps overshadowed by a long discussion of the prospect of a female president.

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I never really thought that I would enjoy slam poetry, but I really enjoyed this one. I also have a friend from Long Island who agreed with the accuracy. I love the rhythm and how deep her Long Island accent got when she was talking about the different women of Long Island. She uses repetition a lot to bring the listener back to the topic and to discuss what the goal of the poem is. I think the point of the poetry to discuss how the women of Long Island will talk and gossip, but when it comes to their people, no one messes with their people. They are tough as nails and may have their differences but will become a united force when needed. This is how all of America should be, not just Long Island. We should not be against each other, but together we need to unite against our enemies. It shouldn't matter what color or race or gender you are. We should all come together like the women of Long Island.

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Olivia Gatwood - "Ode to the Women on Long Island"

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Check out Olivia's brilliant book here: http://bit.ly/olivianabf Become a member! Support Button Poetry: http://bit.ly/buttonpatreon7 Subscribe to Button! New video daily: http://bit.ly/buttonpoetry Minnesota folks! Don't miss Button Poetry Live: http://buttonpoetry.com/buttonpoetrylive Every first Monday at CAMP Bar in downtown Saint Paul. Performing at Button Poetry Live, October 2016.

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This poem is very powerful. It talks about a touchy subject in a joking way but increasing gets more serious. You can see how this poem was going to go. Rape is a joke until its not. Rape is rape until its not. Rape comes in different disguises. Some people don't even recognize rape until after its already happened. Your brain does not want to be raped so it justifies the situation and makes excuses for what the person did. You don't realize its rape until the rapist asks you if you enjoyed last night and you try to remember last night, but you can't. Its a blur. You don't realize its rape until you faintly remember lying on the ground naked and that you were wearing a bra to the party, but now you're not. You put the pieces together and remember that it was just a joke about rape.

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The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. "Ahhhh," it thinks. "Yes. A goatee."

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn't threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee's house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling "a soap opera for men." Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass's My Century, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said "he didn't have those urges when he looked at her anymore," not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father's high-school student - your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, "I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn't there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren't crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you're asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn't know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren't Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends - haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that's a little bit funny.

Admit it.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

(Octopus Books, 2012). Follow her on Twitter at @TriciaLockwood.
You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

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The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee. Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke.

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This poem wraps together my entire curation. The third stanza. Everything good is mentioned in the National Anthem..."home of the brave and land of the free". Who is free? Are women free to make the same salary as men? Do Italian women only care about the mob and not about other Americans? Are Americans capable of making history in art? Should every culture being sterotyped? Should women be portrayed as sexual beings? Is the only acceptable pronoun in power positions a "he"? Is it rape if you should've seen it coming? What is brave? Where is brave? Who is brave? Between the lines of the National Anthem that represents America is an ugliness that comes from the white supremist capitalist patriarchy country that we live in.

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The truth is, I've never cared for the National

Anthem. If you think about it, it's not a good

song. Too high for most of us with "the rockets

red glare" and then there are the bombs.

(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)

Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw

even the tenacious high school band off key.

But the song didn't mean anything, just a call

to the field, something to get through before

the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas

we never sing, the third that mentions "no refuge

could save the hireling and the slave"? Perhaps,

the truth is, every song of this country

has an unsung third stanza, something brutal

snaking underneath us as we blindly sing

the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands

hoping our team wins. Don't get me wrong, I do

like the flag, how it undulates in the wind

like water, elemental, and best when it's humbled,

brought to its knees, clung to by someone who

has lost everything, when it's not a weapon,

when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly

you can keep it until it's needed, until you can

love it again, until the song in your mouth feels

like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung

by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,

the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left

unpoisoned, that song that's our birthright,

that's sung in silence when it's too hard to go on,

that sounds like someone's rough fingers weaving

into another's, that sounds like a match being lit

in an endless cave, the song that says my bones

are your bones, and your bones are my bones,

and isn't that enough?

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A New National Anthem by Ada Limón | Poetry Foundation

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The truth is, I've never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it's not a good song. Too high for most of us with "the rockets red glare" and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.)

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Another fantastic piece by an italian artist. I chose this one because of how special it really is. It is located in a room by itself on a wall in The Louvre. A lot of people expect the painting to be huge, but in reality it is quite small in my opinion. Especially because it is in a giant room on a giant wall. The painting also has a security guard constantly watching it.

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This is the only Italian song that people know of. It has been featured in numerous movies and TV shows. It is a beautiful song, but is often overplayed. Italian music has much more to offer than just this one song. Many people have heard this song, but don't know the name or the author or how much work and what a masterpiece this is.

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Pictures of the Sistine Chapel do not give it the justice it deserves. It is one of the most beautiful works of art I have ever seen. The fact that Michaelangelo was able to paint this on the ceiling is amazing. I saw this in person when I was 10 years old and never have forgotten how mesmerizing it is. Huge crowds of people gather inside this chapel and bump into each other constantly because they are walking around staring at the ceiling.

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I am all for female empowerment. I believe women can do anything a man can do, if not better. I believe men do not own women and as women we have the same rights as women. Women should not be portrayed as just sexual objects. However, when music videos and songs like this come out, they are hard to see past. I do not want my future kids watching the provocative dancing and listening to the lyrics. How can you respect a woman if the woman does not respect themself enough to recognize that their body is sacred? I want to be respected in my work place and thought of as a professional. This song and video is ruining women's chances of gaining equality in the workplace with men.

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Cardi B - WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion [Official Music Video]