Biographical note:

Annette Kuhn’s books include Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema; Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality; The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality; and Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. She is lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Glasgow University.

Country of final manufacture:

US

Main description:

Annette Kuhn’s work as a theorist of culture has won her a wide reputation for dissecting film and other images in books such as Women’s Pictures and The Power of the Image. In Family Secrets, she turns her attention to the deconstruction of pictures closer to home—photographs from her own childhood and images from her shared ethnographic past—to trace a trajectory from personal to collective acts of memory.

Review quote:

“An absorbing and beautiful book that reshapes the relations between feminism and cultural studies. Kuhn’s ‘memory work’ teaches us new ways of learning to make our own personal and collective histories.”—Meaghan Morris

“An accessible, self-questioning, thoughtful book which takes one on a fascinating, labyrinthine journey from the family photograph album to filmic representations of the past.”—Raphael Samuel

“Kuhn ... is one of those rare academics whose prose is a pleasure to read: clear, evocative and accessible.”—New Statesman

“Family Secrets is not only a poignant personal memoir, it is also an exemplary act of engaged cultural criticism. An influential reader of visual culture, a prominent feminist critic, an imaginative analyst of autobiographical and photographic texts, Kuhn provides a blueprint for interpreting the complicated stories we live by, stories who tangled roots lie in our childhood. Brilliantly connecting private history and public event, intimate memory and social theory, Annette Kuhn performs a tour de force.”—Nancy K. Miller