Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program hosted the 2026 Queer Studies Symposium titled, “(Dis)appearance,” sponsored by the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good. Meant for graduate students, the symposium ran from March 26-28. Programming included a tour of the Raclin Murphy Museum and a printmaking workshop, four different panels consisting of graduate students, and a keynote lecture from Professor Marquis Bey of Northwestern University.
Established in 1988, the Gender Studies Program encompasses more than 100 students and 60 faculty members. Though there is no graduate degree offered in Gender Studies, graduate students may pursue a minor concentration in addition to their primary degree.
The “(Dis)appearance” symposium is the second annual event of its kind, following a 2025 graduate students symposium on “Queer (Un)belonging.”
Bey is a professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University and holds joint appointments in Gender and Sexuality Studies, English, and Critical Theory. He is the author of “Black Trans Feminism” and “Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender,” both published by Duke University Press. His new book, “Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory,” is set to be released on April 15.
Bey introduced himself using ‘they/them’ pronouns, saying, “The preference for ‘they/them’ pronouns to describe myself is an attempt to mark my irreverence toward the gender binary and to mark my tentative and always-in-process relationship to gender non-binaryness.”
The keynote lecture for the symposium, titled, “Nonbinary Life and Living: An Offering,” argued for the abolition of gender—a proposition that Bey recognized “makes people bristle.” Bey proposed the question: “What if the categories we cling to—categories that are, at base, non-consensual and often violent, colonial impositions—are not the grounds of liberation, but the architecture of confinement?”
“I mean non-binary as in abolish gender,” Bey stated. “I mean non-binary as a wager that the demand to be a gender at all is part of the problem, an inherited protocol we keep mistaking for freedom.”
Arguing that gender limits human freedom, Bey decried the “trauma” one incurs when approached by someone who assumes their gender. He called, instead, for a “more ethical relationship to one another, such that others are not non-consensually sorted and presumed before they even arrive onto the scene of the interaction.”
In addition to his university position, Bey has been teaching in prisons for the past eight years. During his second year, he taught a class titled, “Queer Theory.” According to Bey, “Queer theory was just the name of the course, a heading under which we were permitted to read certain authors and engage certain ideas. What we were doing in each week, slowly but methodically, was creating, cultivating, practicing non-binary and non-gendered life, a way to do life, to commit to justice without having to commit to gender in order to do so.”
Gender, Bey argued, is a state construct. “What needs gender first and foremost is the state,” he said. “It invents and enforces it. … The state makes its work easier by placing us into these bins, these fixed identities that we must carry, as though they were natural to us, whether through the assignment of sex at birth or the bureaucratic rituals of identification marking ‘M’ or ‘F’ on a driver’s license, passport or birth certificate, the state demands gender, not as a reflection of who we are, but as an excellent way to exercise power over us.”
“The abolition of gender then,” Bey continued, “is a refusal to relinquish our ambiguity, our boundless possibility, to the systems that benefit from our containment.”
“The work of abolition is … to create the condition where no one needs to survive anymore; if some need gender to feel held, affirmed, or safe, we honor that, for now, because the ultimate horizon of abolition is to move beyond even that,” he said.
“So maybe the question is not whether gender works for now, but why it exists at all,” Bey concluded.
During Q&A following the lecture, Bey responded to a question saying, “So for me, non-binary is … an attempt to create another kind of world for us that does not have to rely on gender.”
The Gender Studies Program declined to comment to the Rover’s requests for information regarding the history of the conference and its planning process.
Bridgette Rodgers is a senior studying political science and theology. She is considering breaking the gender binary. Join zer in ze revolucion at brodger4@nd.edu.