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My exhibition shows readers the reality of a female’s daily life. It’s not fully what it’s made out to be which could be fabulous and glamorous. In reality, women live in a society where women are expected to be a certain way including their looks, body and personality. Women are told to please society by making it a society norm for the way they dress, act, look, body appearance, etc. Society makes women look weak, dependent of others, and need a male presence in control. In reality, women already are degraded by how their body looks, how they dress, if they have makeup on or not, how they act, what they eat, and many other aspects as well. Women should be able to do what they want and not care about others and their satisfaction for others. Whether we are wearing makeup or not, dressed up or looking slouchy, skinnier or plus size, it shouldn’t matter. If men are allowed to look this way women should too. Women are degraded constantly in their everyday life and we need encouragement and rights as well. Women should be known as independent in their own way, beautiful in every way, and looked upon equivalently to men. Women have feelings too just like men and that needs to be respected more within society today.

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This poem explains about the value of women. She explains women against the words such as shrill, frilly, silly, drippy, prissy, pouty and fussy. She also made sure to include our sexual identities as to which men use women in such aspect. She identifies us women as glittery tinsel showing a shinny object for men to look at. At the end of the poem she explains that women's minds are snatched by whatever is rushed by, she is saying that women get attached to things such as men that crossed their path.

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The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly

drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while

science was the music of our minds. Our sexual

identities glittery as tinsel, we fretted about god's

difficulties with intimacy, waiting for day's luster

to fade so we could slip into something less

venerated. Like sea anemones at high tide

our minds snatched at whatever rushed by.

Hush, hush, my love. These things happened

a long time ago. You needn't be afraid of them, now.

"Womanishness" from Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler, copyright © 2015 by Amy Gerstler. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Womanishness by Amy Gerstler | Poetry Foundation

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The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science was the music of our minds. Our sexual identities glittery as tinsel, we fretted about god's difficulties with intimacy, waiting for day's luster to fade so we could slip into something less venerated.

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The visual images in Citizen have deeper meanings than discovered at first glance. Rankine uses various striking images and art to create deeper thinking within the readers. One of these outrageous images appear on page 37 shows Caroline Wozniacki mocking Serena Williams athletic and strong body by stuffing towels in her clothes. This image expresses more than words can describe due to emotions on Caroline's face while she blatantly exploited Serena on national television degrading her body as well as being racist along with tearing down how she looks as a women.

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On June 14th 1919 congress proposed an amendment which gave women the right to vote. In the beginning of the 1800's women began petitioning their rights to vote, this started on ongoing battle for women for supporters of the women's suffrage movement. Women who supported this movement were abused physically and mentally in order to fight for our rights today. In the following years The House of Representatives approved the amendment which was then approved by the senate as well two weeks later. In order for women to have the same rights as men as well as treating men and women the same, women in this era fought for women today with giving us equal rights even when today women feel inequality as well.

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Venus of Urbino painted by Titian (1534)

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Venus of Urbino painted by Titian (1534)

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This painting represents Venus, the goddess of love. It shows a bigger women instead of the using a skinnier women to represent the idea of women's body and beauty  standards. The idea of women is to have a perfect body with a slim waist, perfect face and nice figure. This picture shows a bigger women representing the idea that not all men will receive the beauty standards all women are set out to be,

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The quote stated within Citizen showing the degradation of women states "The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers" (Page 17). Women are seen as weak individuals who needs a man to stand up for her as if she can't stand up for herself. It explains how men stand behind her as bodyguards to protect her from the incident because she is a women. This quote from Citizen explains how women are directed as weak and. need a man to stand up for her.

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A very famous piece by the artist Frida Kahlo represents the pain in women suffrage when the rights of women and men were not equal. This piece shows brokenness inside the woman showing a broken column throughout her body. This is showing the emotional pain and trauma women feel and have gone through throughout time. The Broken Column inside a women emotionally and physically is showing abuse and trauma due to recent events in the past. The emotional and physical abuse by men criticizing women about how we should look and act on a daily basis can create a broken column within a women.

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The Broken Column was painted shortly after Frida had undergone surgery on her spinal column. The operation left her bedridden and "enclosed" in a metallic corset, which helped to alleviate the intense, and constant pain she was in.
In the painting she is depicted standing in the middle of a completely arid, cracked landscape. Her torso is encased in metal belts lined with fabric that provide pressure and support for her back. They help to prevent her body from collapsing, a possibility which is announced by the image running down the middle of her torso. There a completely fractured Ionic column on the point of collapse has replaced her spinal column. Frida's head rests on the capital. Although her face is bathed in tears, it doesn't reflect a sign of pain. The attitude she presents is the one she always showed to life itself: strong and defiant to the viewer. The nails piercing her body are a symbol of the constant pain she faced. The largest ones, along the column, mark the damage caused by the accident in 1925, while those adhering to her left breast refer rather to an emotional pain, to her feeling of solitude. When asked once why she so often portrayed herself in her works, Frida replied that it was because she was always alone and because she herself was what she knew best.

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The Broken Column - Frida Kahlo - Google Arts & Culture

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The Broken Column was painted shortly after Frida had undergone surgery on her spinal column. The operation left her bedridden and "enclosed" in a metallic corset, which helped to alleviate the intense, and constant pain she was in.In the painting she is depicted standing in the middle of a completely arid, cracked landscape.

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Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli 

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Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli 

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The quote that stuck out to me the most in Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli states "Rapes: eighty percent of women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. This situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north". Valeria Luiselli shows true statements to show how mistreated women are and how they are taken advantage of when possible. It goes as far as women taking their own caution before traveling to the U.S. to not go through this trauma. With women safety being uncertain in many settings it saddens me to think that there isn't more change to protect women more.

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The quote within The Hate U Give by Angle Thomas that shows how women are portrayed in society today states "I don't think she ever gets a pimple-slanted brown eyes, and long eyelashes that aren't store bought. She's the perfect height for modeling too, but a little thicker than those toothpicks on the runway. She never wears the same outfit twice" (Page 5). This quote is a great example of how women are set to beauty standards and must look at certain way or else they are not appealing to men. As women we are supposed to be perfect in every way, our body, our clothing, and our face. When we hide our face with makeup it seems to be like were "hiding what's underneath", or when we wear slouchy clothes we are not dressed properly as women should be. Women are placed on a pedestal for men to be made as an eye attraction.

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An article that resonated with me throughout the semester was the article by Jane Caro titled "Mother's Day? Don't make Me Laugh". She explains throughout the article the importance of motherhood and how mothers as individuals aren't appreciated enough throughout time and only appreciated on a certain day. She states within her article "We need mother’s lives to be understood and taken seriously in a way they never have been for the full 365 days a year". Women who sign up for motherhood should be appreciated all days of the year not just a certain day and that was Jane Caro's main idea within the passage. Within the article she states "I hate the sickly-sweet, patronizing tone we take about mothers around Mother’s Day, as if by giving birth to children we have somehow become quasi-children ourselves". This article stuck with me throughout the year showing how powerful women really are and how we need to appreciate and embrace women more.

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How regularly it rolls around - the one day of the year when we offer an off-hand, mostly self-interested, sentimentalised 'thank you' to our creators - aka our mothers.

I am on the record (in this very publication, in fact) as a hater of Mother's Day. Not a hater of mothers themselves, of course, being one, but of the absurdity of their so-called special day. Just calling it 'special' is a bit of a wake-up call.

I will never forget the late, great disability activist and comedian Stella Young saying once when someone talked in a smiley voice about people with 'special' needs; "You know what 'special', means, don't you? A little bit shit."

I hate the sickly-sweet, patronising tone we take about mothers around Mother's Day, as if by giving birth to children we have somehow become quasi-children ourselves.

Yet there is nothing sentimental, pretty or fluffy about motherhood. It is a dirty, earthy, messy business from beginning to end; sperm, blood, shit, vernix, meconium, mysterious 'waters', colostrum, breast-milk, mucous, snot, tears, vomit - you name it, mothers either excrete it themselves or must clean it up when excreted by others.

It was Simone de Beauvoir's 'Second Sex' that opened my eyes to the fact that far from venerating mothers, we secretly despise the animal nature of giving birth. The only mother celebrated by Christianity, for example, is a virgin - isolated from messy, beastly (literally) sex. Way to make sure no other actual mother ever felt good about themselves.

Female bodies - particularly when they do what nature designed them to do - and conceive, gestate, birth and feed human young give the lie to the idea that humans are created in the image of the divine.

On the contrary, human reproduction, including sex, reminds us that we are animals, specifically mammals - a kind of brainy ape. We are not special or different. Like every other living creature, we are born, we live, we reproduce, and we die.

Women have borne the burden (if you will excuse the expression) of embodying this annoying and ego-deflating reminder ever since men invented patriarchal religions. Perhaps it is one reason why we have been so universally accorded lesser status by such religious traditions, or as de Beauvoir eloquently expressed it, second place.

Perhaps that is also why there remains such implacable taboos around female reproduction and bodily functions. Why normal activities such as breastfeeding and menstruation still evoke feelings of disgust and a desire to keep them both out of sight and out of mind.

Perhaps it is also why the most unspeakable word in the English language is a word for female genitalia. Why is the word cunt deemed so disgusting? Half the human population have one and the vast majority of us entered the world through one, yet this four-letter word has acquired an almost mystical power to shock.

It is the hypocrisy of it that fuels my resistance to Mother's Day. Just as I think a cheap bottle of perfume (if I hear Cate Blanchett say 'Si' one more time while pulling a face that looks like she's trying not to fart, I will explode), a pair of fluffy slippers or - worst of all - a household gadget is no recompense for the unrelenting work, care and effort of mothering, so I do not believe for a moment that we really respect mothers or the work they do and I don't think we ever have.

Far from it. We take mothers for granted and hardly notice the work they do. We don't pay them for their work and we directly penalise them in the long-term for shouldering the lion's share of caring for others.

We charge them a motza for childcare and structure the tax system to make it uneconomical for them to return to paid work. Despite the fact that women have given birth to every tax payer who has ever lived (as well as being tax payers themselves) we seem to begrudge any expenditure from the public purse which might make their lives easier.

Mother's Day? Don't make me laugh. We need mother's lives to be understood and taken seriously in a way they never have been for the full 365 days a year. Otherwise we will continue to have generation after generation of women - particularly those who have been mothers - becoming the fast growing group among the homeless as they grow old.

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'Mother's Day?' Don't make me laugh: Jane Caro

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How regularly it rolls around - the one day of the year when we offer an off-hand, mostly self-interested, sentimentalised 'thank you' to our creators - aka our mothers. I am on the record (in this very publication, in fact) as a hater of Mother's Day.

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The song "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga is explains women empowerment. Her main line in this song says "baby I was born this way" is empowering stating us as women aren't going to change who we really are for a man and stating I was born this way and this is my true self. She explains throughout the song that women need to love themselves and not change for any person or man. Lady Gaga showed both women empowerment into her song and how us as women, don't need to change who we are for anyone, especially a man.

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The song "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" is a very moving song for women. Ella Eyre shows how men try to use women for their own personal sexual objects. Her main line within the song sings "We don't have to take our clothes off to have a good time". As a woman I can agree with this line that men don't know how to just talk to a girl and have a good time with us without taking it to that point sexually. Another line in the song that I feel is very meaningful sings "Why'd you have to move so fast", men move to fast and don't get the time to get to know a woman because they like to use us as a object. I believe this song by Ella Eyre is very empowering and meaningful towards women and really explain what women go through in our society today.

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Ella Eyre - We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

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The song "If I Were A Boy by Beyoncé clearly shows the difference between men and women. In the song she sings "cause I know that she'd be faithful waiting for me to come home". This line of the song stood out to me the most. Beyoncé is stating the underlying factor that men treat women as an object and men wouldn't wait for a woman to come home and would be unfaithful in order just to have sex with another woman. In another line she sings that is she was a boy she would just roll out of bed in the morning and wear what she wanted. As women, since we are treated as objects and men don't like to look at women who aren't put together, we have to get ready in the morning and make ourselves look presentable every day unlike men. I believe  Beyoncé does an exceptional job in explaining the difference between men and women daily lives in this song.