Are today's traditional gender roles really traditional? In this episode, Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell discuss Illich's description of the gendered world of pre-modernity and why stay-at-home moms are as lonely as ever.

The regime of sex, the reign of gender, a cynical take on capitalism and sexism, and shadow work of the 1950's house wife's... join in for all this and more as Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell discuss chapters 1 & 2 of Ivan Illich's provocative text, "Gender."

Blessed Easter to you! No long podcast in honor of this great solemnity, but we'd like to invite you to join our second "Politics of Gender Book Club." Follow along by reading the first three chapters of "Gender" by Ivan Illich.

Thomas doesn't comment on modern gender theory—directly. But in this podcast, Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell explore how Thomas' notion of "human law" (combined with the brilliant insight of Ivan Illych on modern gender) help us grasp how our primordial task to image God as creative "world-builders" manifests the realm of gender.

Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell return for more gender trouble—but this time, gender trouble for the liberal project. The goal is to make all genders equal and free before the law, so we begin with liberalism’s first task: the creation of an equal legal definition.

Queer theory is all about the search for one's authentic sexual identity and the freedom to express it—or is it? Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell discuss the conclusions of Butler's queer theory and the ultimate aim of its political project.

Whoever controls the narrative, controls the truth. So can "constructing a new narrative" actually liberate oppressed identities? Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell explore the Butlerian critique of gender structuralists to find out.

Gender is a social construct. And so is sex. And so is everything else. Maria Brandell and Marc Barnes finish the first chapter of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and try to show the difference between academic postmodernism and the naive identity politics of popular transgender and queer identity construction.

Feminism can't figure out what women are, at least not without excluding someone. Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell explicate Judith Butler's troubling of feminism in the second part of their book club on Gender Trouble.

Join Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell's book club on Judith Butler's queer theory classic, "Gender Trouble." Part I features a look into the text's backdrop, postmodernism—and its unexpected confirmation of Catholic doctrine.

Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell discuss how their dissatisfaction with both sides of the gender debate led them to take a closer look at the Catholic theological tradition.