EBOOK
About
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. Clever Girl by Hannah McGregor examines the most famous of dinosaur movies, Jurassic Park, and its treatment of the film's all-female dinosaur population, their connection to the fear of female monstrosity, and how they loom as figures of chaotic otherness.
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.
"In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor offers a queer feminist reading of Jurassic Park that celebrates the wild, the ravenous, and the rageful while honoring the kinship and care we need in our apocalypse survival kits." - Zena Sharman, author of The Care We Dream Of
"It's a joy to watch Hannah McGregor examine the film like a prism, with each rotation revealing a new flash of intimate memoir, brilliant feminist analysis, and apocalypse survival guide. This book bites back." - Tajja Isen, author of Some of My Best Friends
"If you love reading smart books, you'll appreciate this artful dance of storytelling and cultural criticism." - Chantal Gibson, author of With/holding and How She Read
"Clever Girl is attentive and open, engaging a depth of academic research alongside lively prose that moves at a quick clip." - andrea bennett, author of Like a Boy but Not a Boy
"Hannah McGregor is the most astute, engaging guide you could ask for, whether you're navigating a dinosaur-infested island or the patriarchy-infested wider world." - Jess Zimmerman, author of Women and Other Monsters
Sales and Market Bullets
• SCHOLARLY YET PERSONAL: McGregor's tone is scholarly and personal, with lots of humor and excitement mixed in. The potential heaviness of topics such as fatness, queerness, asexuality, death, film theory, and queer theory is balanced by McGregor's sheer enthusiasm for this classic film.
• QUEER FEMINIST STORYTELLING: McGregor argues that dinosaurs are so much more than a simple spectacle. Jurassic Park drives this home repeatedly with the sheer (and queer!) otherness of the dinosaurs threatening to escape human control.
• "CLEVER GIRL!" GET IT?! It's what Muldoon calls the velociraptor right before she devours him, and it points to the core themes of female monstrosity and admiration
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. Clever Girl by Hannah McGregor examines the most famous of dinosaur movies, Jurassic Park, and its treatment of the film's all-female dinosaur population, their connection to the fear of female monstrosity, and how they loom as figures of chaotic otherness.
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.
"In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor offers a queer feminist reading of Jurassic Park that celebrates the wild, the ravenous, and the rageful while honoring the kinship and care we need in our apocalypse survival kits." - Zena Sharman, author of The Care We Dream Of
"It's a joy to watch Hannah McGregor examine the film like a prism, with each rotation revealing a new flash of intimate memoir, brilliant feminist analysis, and apocalypse survival guide. This book bites back." - Tajja Isen, author of Some of My Best Friends
"If you love reading smart books, you'll appreciate this artful dance of storytelling and cultural criticism." - Chantal Gibson, author of With/holding and How She Read
"Clever Girl is attentive and open, engaging a depth of academic research alongside lively prose that moves at a quick clip." - andrea bennett, author of Like a Boy but Not a Boy
"Hannah McGregor is the most astute, engaging guide you could ask for, whether you're navigating a dinosaur-infested island or the patriarchy-infested wider world." - Jess Zimmerman, author of Women and Other Monsters
Sales and Market Bullets
• SCHOLARLY YET PERSONAL: McGregor's tone is scholarly and personal, with lots of humor and excitement mixed in. The potential heaviness of topics such as fatness, queerness, asexuality, death, film theory, and queer theory is balanced by McGregor's sheer enthusiasm for this classic film.
• QUEER FEMINIST STORYTELLING: McGregor argues that dinosaurs are so much more than a simple spectacle. Jurassic Park drives this home repeatedly with the sheer (and queer!) otherness of the dinosaurs threatening to escape human control.
• "CLEVER GIRL!" GET IT?! It's what Muldoon calls the velociraptor right before she devours him, and it points to the core themes of female monstrosity and admiration
Related Subjects
Extended Details
- SeriesPop Classics (ECW Press) #14