A Queer Feminist Storytelling of Jurassic Park

“Here’s a detail of Jurassic Park you may have forgotten,” writes Hannah McGregor in Clever Girl, “all of the dinosaurs are engineered to be female to prevent them from reproducing.”

I had indeed forgotten this fact about Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1993 film. As a child growing up in the 1970s, my knowledge of dinosaurs came from repeated readings of National Geographic’s Dinosaurs issue. In that slim illustrated text, TRex, “King of the Tyrant reptiles”, eats Triceratops in a bloody battle. In contrast to the scaly female protagonists of Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs’ muscular bodies, dagger-like teeth, and insatiable lust for meat denoted their masculinity.

In Clever Girl, McGregor refuses such tidy gender binaries and embraces the queer pleasures of dinosaurs.

McGregor is a feminist scholar and podcaster. An episode of the podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, in which she discussed how Jurassic Park deeply informed her ideas about feminism, sparked the idea for Clever Girl. McGregor’s podcasting experience—specifically, her ability to communicate complex ideas in accessible ways—comes through in her witty prose.

Clever Girl is the 14th book in ECW’s Pop Classics series. Like Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons, these pocket-sized books invite authors to reframe, re-contextualize, and rethink the familiar. This slim neon-green monograph–complete with dinosaur scale endpapers—delivers a feminist take on the pop phenomenon Jurassic Park.

The first film in the adventure sci-fi franchise, Jurassic Park, was a technological and cinematic breakthrough. It broke multiple records, earned the creators a 1994 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was the first movie to surpass $500 million worldwide. While its computer-generated special effects and the film’s place in cinematic history are indisputable, its scientific contributions are questionable.

The liberties the screenwriters took, argues McGregor, continue to shape popular understandings of dinosaurs. She points out that “as any true dinosaur nerd will tell you, Jurassic Park’s clever girls are not even velociraptors; they’re actually deinonychus (from the Greek for ‘terrible claw’) and were deliberately misnamed by Michael Crichton, the original novel’s author, because ‘velociraptor is more fun to say and most Americans don’t have a working knowledge of Greek.” McGregor sets the record straight on technicalities like this one.

Amidst insights about Jurassic Park, McGregor tells her story of growing up. She is nine when she first sees Jurassic Park, and the film stays with her, providing a backdrop for her coming-of-age. McGregor recalls, “My mother would get sick, and then die, thrusting me into a world without safety or assurances. I would come to realize I was queer, and then that I was asexual, upending any neat ideas I had about the contours that a life might have.” McGregor comes to identify with rather than fear dinosaurs as she tethers the heart-wrenching loss of her mother to the illusions of rationality and control proffered by Jurassic Park. More than a survival movie, McGregor argues that the film “is a feminist apocalypse that asserts matriarchal, care-based values in the face of a crisis of motherlessness.”  

Clever Girl is theoretically sharp and well-written. McGregor seamlessly weaves feminist thinkers like Barbara Creed, Laura Mulvey, and Jess Zimmerman into her analysis and recollections. Refreshingly, Hannah McGregor veers away from pat ideological criticism, and Clever Girl is not weighted down by academic jargon. She’s a generous writer who assumes that the theoretical tools employed are familiar to readers, and if they are not, readers are smart enough to understand anyway. The result is a rare book that is theoretically rich, analytically astute, and damn good fun to read.

Clever Girl is a memoir, a love letter to monstrous femininities and queer kinships, and a pocket guide to reading like a feminist. Writes McGregor: “I, too, have felt caged and furious. I, too, have figured out how to make kin for myself despite being told that I could not. And I, too, have wanted to devour the architects of a world that could not contain me. Coming face to face with the sublime beauty and terror of life itself, I have learned how to look it in the eye, unblinking.”

Readers will come away with a new understanding of Jurassic Park. McGregor’s Clever Girl embraces rather than rejects female monstrosity. In so doing, the patriarchal gender binary falls apart and makes room for a story of interdependence and collective survival. A world in which “women and non-binary people and queers and weirdos inherit the Earth.”

“Just go watch the movie; it slaps,” advises McGregor. So, too, does Clever Girl. Just go read the book.

Disclaimer: Elizabeth Marshall and Hannah McGregor are colleagues at Simon Fraser University.