A Journey Towards Embracing Ethnicity and Otherness in Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdul-Fattah

    In Does My Head Look Big in This? Randa Abdul-Fattah explores the world of young people and to where their mentality turns. Of the many ideas handled in the novel, my paper underlines the attitude of young adult female Muslim minority towards the recurring "otherizing" images associating Muslims with terrorism: the West sees that Muslim men impose and exercise their patriarchal authority over subordinated passive Muslim women. Hijab epitomizes Eastern backwardness, oppression, otherness, and national insecurity. The novelist resents this defective Orientalist eye reawakened following 9/11events and other terrorist activities. Through her characters, she makes an opposing statement. This paper tackles the issue of the "other" from a pure social perspective. It questions these Western views that otherize the Orient and its women. Also, it brings to light how "otherizing" may be inflicted, as well, upon "white young women" when they break the norms of the "exclusively" Western civilized way of life. The paper aims at conveying a real-life picture of a new-generation of solid young women ready to bear the burden of change. They seek to shape a third Western-Eastern history replacing the oppositional binary West vs. East. Applying the analytic method, four girls in their teens are spotlighted as typifying how women confront challenges and do strive against any suppression of their personalities. Supported with critical approaches of a number of theorists, post-colonial and current, the paper has shown how the 
racial superiority is undermined and the Western ideology is refuted and proved futile. It also has indicated that Eastern women enthusiastically re-conceptualize the "other".