Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian – even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been ‘ghosted’ – or made to seem invisible – by culture itself. It would be putting it mildly to say that the lesbian represents a threat to patriarchal protocol: Western civilization has for centuries been haunted by a fear of ‘women without men’ – of women indifferent or resistant to male desire. Precisely because she challenges the moral, sexual, and psychic authority of men so thoroughly, the ‘Amazon’ has always provoked anxiety and hatred. As the lesbian philosopher Monique Wittig has put it, ‘The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role 'woman’. It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man.’ Under the circumstances it’s perhaps no wonder that so many men (and some women) have sought to see the lesbian 'disappeared.’
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4-5. (via funeral)
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