'Trainspotting': Gender Politics And Bodily Fluid In Irvine Welsh

# "Fuck All That Shite": Gender Politics and Bodily Fluid in Irvine Welsh’s _Trainspotting_

## Introduction:

### about the novel

_Trainspotting_, the first major publication of Irvine Welsh, depicts Edinburgh youths in 1980s, many of whom live on social benefit and are addicted to illegal drugs. The story progresses as the episodes jumps from time to time and space to space, and the fragmented episodes are narrated by various characters and some by third person narrator, while the focus is on Mark Renton. Although the novel attracted wide range of audience, including those who had never put hand on literary works (Berman 58), what astonished the conventional readership of novels was its sexually explicit language and graphic description

The novel repeatedly describes the plight of women who are physically and psychologically abused by men, such as June, Begbie's girlfiend who his battered when she is pregnant, and the woman in a pub who defends her boyfriend even after being hit by him.

The abusers are, actually, the working class, relatively poor, oppressed group in the society.
Kelly comments on the dynamics of the victim turning into the oppressor: "The tendency amongst some of Welsh's characters who are themselves oppressed to oppress others as a means of asserting some form of beleaguered power . . . is an example of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White term _displaced abjection_," which is the process in which the members of the supposedly low group turns their power to the "lower," not against those in authority (20).

### masculinized revenge

The mechanism is transfered to the avengeful relationship between male and female, which ostensibly seem to show the reclamation of power by the women. Berthold Shoene-Harwood deals with Welsh's second novel _Marabou Stork Nightmares_, and explores shows power relation. He clarifies that the victim-turned victimisor is not limitted to working class