"“To try to write the literary history of lesbianism is to confront, from the start, something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or “whiting out” of possibility…Given the threat that sexual love between women inevitably poses to the workings of patriarchal arrangement, it has often been felt necessary to deny the carnal bravada of lesbian existence. The hoary misogynist challenge, “But what do lesbians do?” insinuates as much: This cannot be. There is no place for this. It is perhaps not so surprising that at least till 1900 lesbianism manifests itself in the western literary imagination primarily as an absence, as chimera or amor impossilbilia- a kind of love that, by definition, cannot exist…The literary history of lesbianism, I would like to argue, is first of all a history of derealization… One woman or the other must be a ghost, or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited, only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized. The vision is inevitably waved off. Panic seems to underwrite these obsessional spectralizing gestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility of women breaking free- together- from their male sexual overseers. Homophobia is the order of the day, entertains itself (wryly or gothically) with phantoms, then exorcises them.”"

- Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture