AustLit

Pearce looks closely at two recent Australian texts and the specific portrayal of Muslim-Australian girls. She utilizes a postcolonial approach to compare the ways in which the film Marking Time and the novel Does My Head Look Big in This? engage in the racialized politics of Muslim identity.

In terms of the struggle for agency and identity, Pearce argues that Marking Time conforms to an Orientalist paradigm, whereby Muslim identity is represented as mysterious and exotic, providing the site for the white, western male hero's 'rite of passage' (p.59). In contrast, Does My Head Look Big in This? challenges negative stereotypes and notions of 'tolerance' which permeate western representations of Muslim identities and culture, by re-articulating a politics of difference and indicating possibilites for the inscription and articulation of cultural hybridity and multiple subjectivities.