Anita Kunz's "Girls Will Be Girls" Analysis

Anita Kunz’s “Girls Will be Girls”, which serves as the cover to the 30 July 2007 edition of the New Yorker, shows three different women sitting on the subway. From left to the right, the first womanis an olive-skinned Muslim dressed in a niqab; the second woman is a tanned blonde wearing sunglasses, a bikini top and shorts; the third woman is a pale Catholic nun in glasses and a habit.Significantly, the women’s outfits reveal and conceal different parts of their bodies. Most of the Muslim woman’s face and body is hidden, apart from her eyes. Similarly, only the nun’s face is visible, andeven that is partially obscured by her glasses. By way of contrast, the blonde woman is showing most of her body: her face, chest, belly, arms and legs are exposed. Interestingly, though, her eyes arecovered by her sunglasses. We may wonder whether Kunz is making a comment about veiling practices, whether she is suggesting that all women veil themselves in different ways.
Looking further at thethree women, we may notice that their concealing clothes and accessories are the same colour. The nun and the Muslim woman both are wearing black robes, while the blonde woman’s sunglasses and bikinitop are also black. The consistent use of this colour links the three outfits together, and seems to imply that they are serving a similar function: namely, hiding parts of the body that areconsidered inappropriate for public display by their culture or religion. The choice of black as their common colour reinforces the idea of concealment, since black is the colour of darkness, shadows andcensor bars.
Kunz’s suggestion that sunglasses serve as a kind of veil is particularly interesting, and merits further examination. As noted above, these three women are sitting on the subway train,which is underground and out of the sun. We might expect the blonde woman to remove her sunglasses in such a situation, yet she continues to wear them. We could interpret this choice as her attempt to...