My Name is My Own

Oberlin College has long cultivated a reputation for advancing cutting-edge thinking and scholarship, and for supporting historically disenfranchised communities. My Name Is My Own takes this work another step forward, organizing exciting conversations within the Oberlin community, across disciplines, and with national scholars and community organizers on the front lines of academic and sociopolitical innovation.

The primary mission of My Name Is My Own is to provide institutional support to Oberlin communities that identify as queer and of color in the broadest senses of those words. In pursuit of this goal, My Name Is My Own supports and creates multiple and varied spaces in order to allow for:

1. support, reflection, and community-building within queer communities of color at Oberlin,
2. education and confrontation of oppressive praxis in non-queer and or non-of color Oberlin communities and individuals, and
3. inter- and intra-community coalition-building.

These spaces encourage participants to explore the construction and experience of race and sexuality, gender and sex in various communities, foregrounding the experiences, concerns and work of queer people of color.

My Name Is My Own features public lectures, film screenings, artistic and activist performances, workshops, and small discussion groups between students, faculty and national scholars and organizers.