Virginia Woolf: Masculinity as Imperial 'Parade'

This paper is a joke. Of course it is a serious joke and I'm haunted by Freud's suggestion in jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious that 'a joke loses its effect of laughter' for the recipient 'as soon as he is required to make an expenditure of intellectual work in connection with it'. 1 So relax and envisage me agonizing over my paper when I should have been dealing with Second Year modularisation and suddenly urgently a~are I had washing-up to do. So on go the radio and my rubber gloves and I gatner that in a few moments Dr Karen Burke will be telling 'us ladies' how to have ' thin thighs for life'.2 My ears prick up, suddenly cellulite is one of life's major problems.