Date/Time: Tuesday 17 October 2023, 5.30pm

Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University

 Add to Google Calendar

All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 10 October. To reserve your place click the booking link below or telephone our booking voicemail line 0191 208 6136.

Chaired by Dr Stacy Gillis, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture

Simone de Beauvoir has often been called the ‘mother’ of second-wave feminism, with The Second Sex its bible. ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ is widely cited as a slogan for the view that gender is socially constructed. But the book itself never uses the word ‘gender’ – and its central question is not ‘What is a woman?’; rather, The Second Sex is an existential experiment with a liberatory aim, asking: ‘How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself?’

Biography

Kate Kirkpatrick is a philosopher based in Oxford, where she is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College. She is author of Sartre on Sin (OUP, 2017), Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the internationally acclaimed biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019), which was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The Telegraph, and is currently being translated into over a dozen languages. In 2021 she was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to write a philosophical commentary on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.