Clever Girl: Jurassic Park - Paperback

by Hannah McGregor (Author)

A smart and incisive exploration of everyone's favorite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free

The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time -- an entire generation of people has never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. The movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, and now it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling.

In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.

About the Pop Classics Series

Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.

Author Biography

Hannah McGregor is an academic, podcaster, and author living on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver, BC). She is the director of publishing at Simon Fraser University, co-director of the Amplify Podcast Network, and co-founder of feminist media company Witch, Please Productions. McGregor co-edited Refuse: CanLit in Ruins and authored A Sentimental Education.