Even when lesbian presences seem to become flesh and blood, with the promise that once they appear, there is no turning back, violence and the persistence of the lesbian ghost reemerge.
This is a persecution of that unnameable thing that has accompanied me all my life until I was able to recognize myself in its spectral figure and make it flesh. Its eyes became my mirror, and I named myself: lesbian. I looked directly into those eyes, and in that conversation we had, I understood that spectrality is part of the social construction of the lesbian body and existence. Even when lesbian presences seem to become flesh and blood, with the promise that once they appear, there is no turning back, violence and the persistence of the lesbian ghost reemerge.
But we keep appearing and disappearing. We continue moving through closets, inhabiting and proliferating in their shadows. We have developed survival strategies in the darkness to keep inhabiting both the corporeal world and the ghostly world.
Thinking about the lesbian ghost is very different from conceptualizing the lesbian body or existence; it goes beyond materialization and beyond modern sexual identity and its political subject. For this, it is necessary to develop a spectral gaze that identifies and unveils the ghosting operations of lesbian presences and reconstructs genealogies free from the requirement to prove life, an existential documented proof that could only be provided by the historicity inherent to the materiality of the lesbian subject.
The lesbian ghost has its own logic, and it is time to map it.
