Brée Lecture: “One is not born, but becomes, a genius”: Another Simone de Beauvoir

Kate Kirkpatrick, Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow presents the 2022 Germaine Breé Lecture on another reading of Beauvoir’s magnum opus. Kirkpatrick proposes that Beauvoir’s burning question is not the abstract metaphysical inquiry “What is a woman?” Rather, The Second Sex is an existential experiment, the aim of which is liberatory.