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 cinematic experiences of all time, with an entire generation of people who have never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. But while the movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, 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.

Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, a feminist podcaster, and a CanLit killjoy. She co-hosts the popular Harry Potter podcast Witch, Please, and hosts the slightly-less-popular podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, a weekly discussion of the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives. When she isn't podcasting, Hannah writes about Canadian literature and publishing for mostly academic venues, including the edited collections Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2016) and Reading Modernism With Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). She lives in Vancouver on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and has two cats; one is named after a poet, and the other is named after a breakfast.

Hannah McGregor's profile page

“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