In the United States, veiled Muslim women tend to be portrayed as either timid, obedient, submissive wives or ideologically brainwashed. They are rarely represented as ordinary people who can also be bold, humorous, intelligent and assertive, or an independent thinker who simply decides to wear modest clothes and cover their hair.
Understanding these limited representations of Muslim women in America, an American comic illustrator, Huda Fahmy attempts to debunk the inaccurate portrayals by creating witty comic strips that shows how she lives her life as a veiled Muslim woman, how she reacts to Islamophobic comments made by total strangers she met on the street, and how often she, a veiled Muslim woman who lives in Texas, gets asked “Aren’t you hot in that?”.
Launched in 2017, Huda’s Yes, I’m Hot in This comic strips are often hilarious and satirical. She shows her viewers the ridiculous situations she has to face on daily merely for wearing a headscarf, such as the time when she was asked where she came from, or when people presume that she’s an oppressed Muslim woman who is forced to wear the headscarf and not allowed to go to school. She also shows real-life circumstances when she’s being told that her attire isn’t appropriate for America or that in American beach, she can actually wear “REAL bathing suit”.
At times, Huda also responds to trending news or memes on Muslim women, such as that one time when a Norwegian anti-immigrant group mistook a photograph of empty bus seats for Muslim women wearing burqas. Huda’s reaction was a comic strip in which her Islamophobic friend Susan, a recurring fictional character in her comic, brags how open-minded she is by showing a selfie of herself with some Muslims on her bus ride home—which turns out to be a couple rows of empty bus seats.
Check out Huda’s brilliant comic strip! Read it on Instagram, Facebook, or Webtoons!
Also visit this Malaysian website Queer Lapis that covers the LGBTIQ experiences in the country.
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