This week I was overjoyed to have some time to sit down with Margaret France and talk all about life.
I think I’d like to start with GSA. What has that been like this year?
GSA is very satisfying in that GSA actually exists this year, because last year it did not. Now we have a strong board and there’s outreach. And the most important thing to me is that if a student is coming out that they know that they can go somewhere and talk to people who care and it’s great I’ve been at meetings where people are like “I just came out” or “nobody knows” and that’s incredible because when I was in college I didn’t go to anything like that.
We went on to talk about Augie’s campus and how GSA is a safe place for LGBTQ+ students.
I had a lot of sympathy for students here because this is a campus that’s a lot more conformist in general. And that’s not to say the students are conformist, but oftentimes this is a choice that students make thinking “I want to do the right thing” and not necessarily “I want to be myself.” So having a strong GSA makes a huge difference. Because students are gonna figure out who they are in college no matter where they go even if they’ve decided to go to someplace that’s a little bit more conservative than who they are inside.
What events are coming up for GSA?
Day of Silence/Night of Noise. April 21st there will be a moment of silence- because it’s not fair to (I would be down to be silent all day) students to say “oh you have to be silent all day.” When I was in college there was a lot of controversy around silence as a form of protest because the students who are most likely to protest are the students who are often not being listened to to begin with.
Margaret explained to me what the moment of silence would look like for Augie’s campus.
We’ll have a moment of silence in the middle of the day where we just meet and talk a little bit about what it means to see bullying because I think a lot of what we think of now as bullying we used to just think of as keeping people in line. Then that evening I think starting at 8pm in Wallenberg there’s going to be a show called Night of Noise- not really sure what they’re doing yet- I think it’s gonna be like a drag contest and I think my band No Pants Friday is going to play a short set at the beginning because we are the premier faculty/staff queer band on campus. The other faculty/staff band is not queer and they’re better than we are, but since they’re not queer- we’re number one. So I’m excited about that.
Let’s talk about yoga now. How has that influenced your life?
Oh my goodness- how has it not influenced my life? I started practicing in 2010 when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Because at that point I already ate really really well and I already exercised every day, I was like “what do you want me to do? Oh, so I’m sick now? What do you want me to do now?” And I started doing yoga when I moved to Turkey.
Woah!
So I was diagnosed with MS and I had already taken the job in Turkey and my doctor was like “well, there’s not really a lot we can do, so you should just go and do whatever you were going to do and then if something weird happens it’s because you have MS” and I’m like “alright- let’s do that.” But I was in shock and denial and stuff. So all of this sounded like exactly what I wanted to hear. Now, I look back on it and I’m like- gosh, if that were my friend I don’t know if I’d be like “this is what you should be doing right now”- but everybody let me! And it was fine, it was probably the right thing to do.
So how’d you start?
I moved to Turkey and started taking yoga at the university in Turkey. The yoga class cost like 30 lera per term, taking as many classes as 3 days a week and so 30 lera per term probably breaks down to less than a dollar per class. It was SO cheap and my teacher was just wonderful and yoga is primarily taught in English anyway. Plus, exercising in Turkey for women is not as much of a thing as it is in the U.S. so even though I just started yoga- I was amazing- so that was good.
I just learned that my body could still surprise me in good ways. Which I was diagnosed with MS because I lost sight in my left eye- which is not the worst surprise you could have, but a big disappointment. My eyesight came back, but it was nice to, after you have something like that like “OH, this can happen?” to then be like “Oh and now my legs are behind my head this can happen too. Oh I can do a headstand- this can happen.” It’s been really healthy for me. When I moved to the Quad Cities from Turkey, I just started going to a yoga studio and got even more into it. I was going 3-4 days a week, then here it was 5-6 days a week, sometimes 7. Now I probably practice a little less than that. 3-5 days a week. My whole social life outside of Augustana is directly from yoga. I started a book club with the yoga studio. I’ve started having classes in my house. And I have classes on campus too. I try to make it as integrative as possible into my life because I think it benefits students not to sit. If I see student and they’re just dying in their chairs- it doesn’t take a genius to know it’d benefit them to move around for a bit.
Now let’s discuss being a feminist and what that means for you.
My mother raised me saying that she didn’t go to law school because her boyfriend at the time was like “we can get married or you can go to law school.” And I’ve always known growing up, that if she hadn’t felt like getting married and having kids was what she needed to do that she would have had a completely different life. So I never wanted to be somebody who necessarily made decisions based on having a family. And my twin sister has gone completely the other direction. So being a twin, I think, actually really impacts the way I think about feminism because when there’s two girls there’s basically: you can be good at being pretty or you can be good at everything else. And I was very much on the everything else side of it. And so I felt like that was really lucky and really freeing, because if you’re not worrying about being pretty… I guess that’s what men have. It’s really different and I think that’s one of the reasons people talk about women’s colleges as sites of empowerment.
I want to be in the world as a woman who is proud of being a woman, but at the same time not making anybody feel weird about their choices of being a woman. The first category that people slot you into is gender- even before race, they decide what gender you are. And I present myself through my life as being more ambiguous and less ambiguous. When I was in Turkey a few years ago I had my hair straightened every day, I wore makeup every day, I wore pencil skirts. So it’s like I know I can do that, but why? And the reason why was that I really wanted to disappear. I wanted everyone to be nice to me, I wanted to pass for being a regular lady. The more comfortable I am somewhere the less likely I am to do that.
When I first came to Augustana I had longer hair, I dressed more feminine, all that stuff. And I love that I’m free to do that. Not everyone is free to do that. In that sense, intersectional feminism is really important to me. No matter what, no matter how I present my gender, I’m never going to get pulled over because I’m driving a Honda. Somebody might mistake me for being a dude, but they’re going to mistake me for being a white dude. Which is very lucky, and not something I had anything to do with. So when I think about feminism I think that it’s really a gift that all women have to get into justice movements because they know, when you are born a woman, you immediately know what it’s like to have people who have expectations that don’t have anything to do with who you are. And that’s a common ground that we see. Our sisters who are African American, our sisters who wear the hijab, our sisters. That’s turning a weakness into a strength. I hope in the future we see that that leads to coalitions, and it already has, for sure.
But before I’m queer, before I’m American, I’m a woman. Before I am white, I am a woman. Before I’m disabled, I’m a woman. And dealing with being a woman in the world is to prepare me to deal with every other thing after that. That’s the core of who I am so when people ask me “How does that affect your work?” or “How does that affect your social life?” – how does it not? It’s in all of it.
Thank you so much Margaret- it was a pleasure interviewing you!