There's a phenomenon where the majority of books you read keep citing a specific earlier work, and you build it up in your mind to being something larger and more significant than it turns out to be. Of course, academic citations aren't necessarily a mark of significance; sometimes they're an acknowledgment of origins, of idea-lineages, of honoring those who first mapped out the territory. But it can still, sometimes, feel like a let-down when you finally get around to reading some highly-cited work and it doesn't live up to the image you've created in your head.
The core essence of Terry Castle's The Apparitional Lesbian is the idea that lesbian invisibility in popular culture is neither a reflection of the absense of lesbians nor an accidental coincidence, but rather is a systematic (if uncoordinated) process of framing lesbianism and lesbian characters as unreal, illusory, or not of this world.
While I follow the general argument presented here, I do have one bone to pick with what I feel is an unexamined bias. Castle's work started off as a study of ghost stories in post-Enlightenment literature. As she started seeing more and more lesbian characters and themes in those stories, she developed the idea of the "apparitional lesbian" -- the lesbian who moves through popular culture only as a ghostly motif. But this seems to be a "hammer problem" as in, "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail." If your focal field of study is ghost literature, and you keep seeing lesbians in that literature, does that mean that all lesbians in literature are ghostly? Or does it mean that you'd find lesbian characters and themes in other types of literature as well, if that were your field of study? And if you're looking for "ghostly lesbians" to explore a theory, how hard are you working to view those characters through a ghost-lens?
So, as I read this book, I kept asking myself, "Is this a genuine universal cultural theme, or is it an artifact of one academic's preoccupations?" I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of others who have read the book.
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