Fireside Chat

Fireside Chat Artist Statement

As soon as the Fireside Chat assignment was announced in class, one artistic piece came to mind: Hamilton. Now I’ve never actually seen the play in person — I haven’t even listened to the full soundtrack. However, I’ve heard enough songs and been told enough about it to know what it’s about. It’s a musical done in the style of rap that covers the struggles of the founding fathers in the American Revolution, particularly following Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. It takes a musical genre that is so often overlooked as raunchy and meaningless and expresses a truly meaningful story through it, and I wanted to do something similar with my presentation at the Fireside Chat.

The next step from there was to figure out what I’d make my rap about. I listened to Brené Brown’s TED talk “The Power of Vulnerability” and realized that I’d best connect with everyone else by making myself as vulnerable as possible. Of course, this idea wasn’t new to me—I’ve realized it repeatedly throughout my life. All through middle school and into my earlier high school years, I struggled with insecurities over my identity—a common conflict for teenagers, however, my struggle was compounded by crippling social anxiety. I only overcame my social anxiety and began to make friends easily once I learned to drop my fake, “cooler” personality and open up about the real me—a position which felt extremely vulnerable at the time.

Of course, my social anxiety and identity issues are old news; opening up about that now brings me no real feelings of vulnerability. So I asked myself: what might be a part of me that feels vulnerable? And as I thought about this, I realized the recent large identity change I had undergone in the last year. I had come from believing a number of things that I now view as toxic to believing heavily in a number of social movements that I had previously criticized. I decided to focus my presentation on my conversion to feminism. Rather than talk about it directly, I thought it best to create a character that would, throughout the course of my song, go through a similar journey that I had to embrace feminism. Of course, that character is, to a degree, an exaggeration of myself. However, I used to be in quite a similar place to where my character started out: I believed myself a victim of feminism, I believed that their hate against the “patriarchy” meant a hate against all men, and I believed that feminists had nothing to protest today—they had gained equal rights. 

I now recognize how wrong I was about all of that. Feminism isn’t about hating men, it’s about encouraging everyone with patriarchal mindsets to recognize culturally engrained ideologies that keep men and women unequal. Though women in western countries have achieved equality on paper (in most areas), that doesn’t mean that they are truly equal in real life. We must recognize that women still suffer, and there is still work to be done to make sure that we women can obtain true equality to men. Not only that, we must make sure that every single person, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or belief is treated equally under the law, culturally, verbally, and physically. Feminism is liberty for everyone.