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The Apparitional Lesbian: female homosexuality and modern culture T. CASTLE, 1993
New York, Columbia University Press x+ 307 pp., 0 231 07653 3 `The lesbian is never with us, it seems, but always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind, a wanderer in the dusk, a lost soul, a tragic mistake, a pale denizen of the night. She is far away and she is dire' (p. 2). Well, that depends-as Terry Castle's collection of essays makes eminently clear: where for a heterosexual person lesbians may be nowhere to be seen, lesbians may be everywhere for a lesbian, with the issue of being out as lesbian only matched by the extent of the gossip among lesbians about who is and who isn't-a lesbian. Such gossip constitutes one end of the spectrum of what Castle's title The Apparitional Lesbian suggests, and there have been interesting studies of...