You did not find yourself. You are making yourself. And the conditions under which that making is happening are not neutral.

That is the core claim of Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy — and it reaches far beyond the question of gender it is most often associated with. It is a claim about what any self is, how it comes to be, and what it means to take responsibility for who you are becoming when the forces shaping you are largely invisible.

In this solo episode, Claire takes the full measure of one of the twentieth century's most important and most underread thinkers. She covers what de Beauvoir's famous sentence — one is not born a woman, one becomes one — is actually arguing beneath the slogan; how de Beauvoir takes Sartre's existentialism and makes it philosophically stronger by insisting that freedom is always situated, alw ...