From Passive Matter to Embodied Affects: Gendering Emotions in the Classical Tradition

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide the philosophical underpinnings of the Stoic, or Stoic-inflected, lineage of emotion history that extends through the texts I examine in this book. My primary focus will be on Stoic emotion theory, and specifically, on the Stoics’ conception of an irresistible psychosomatic response to external stimuli, the so-called prepassion. But I begin by examining the long and crucial history of construing emotional response as a kind of internalized feminine softness or impressibility that renders the subject vulnerable to external, uncontrolled objects in the world.

Emily Rapp Black, Sanctuary, 132.