Clever Girl Explains Why Jurrassic Park is for the Gays

Hannah McGregor’s Clever Girl is a short read that, at the least, will make you watch Jurassic Park again, and at the most, turn Spielberg’s dinosaurs into furious queer icons.

What Clever Girl really does is save Jurassic Park. I’m not a dinosaur queer; I never really was or will be. The emphasis on meat-eating sorta lizards was one of the most bizarre aspects of compulsory masculinity that I enjoyed as a child. And, as I grew up, I shed it without a second thought. In the early 2000s, the Jurassic Park franchise was limping along after a really not great Jurassic Park III. I think of the ironic cut when we go from Dr. Grant nuzzling Richard Hammonds grandkids into sleep, to Hammond, conspicuously alone in the visitor center dining hall, surrounded by child-targeted paraphernalia. I was that child. I grew up blasting dinosaurs in Jurassic Park arcade games, dodging branches while running from velociraptors on my iPad, and quoting a movie I had never seen.

When I DID finally get around to watching Jurassic Park, probably in my early teens, I was a little bored. I had grown up with these dinosaurs as the enemy of so many spin-off titles to get to Jurassic Park and watch Sam Neill stare, semi-goofily, at an animatronic brachiosaurus. Not only that, but I wasn’t scared of the dinosaurs; to me they were just dinosaurs, in the opening scene, I was like, “Duh, it’s a velociraptor; of course you’re going to get eaten.” My dinosaur I.Q. was totally and incorrectly saturated.

So, it was lovely to get a look at indie publisher ECW’s latest, Clever Girl, which explains why we should care about Jurassic Park. And by we, author Hannah McGregor means “fat femmes, clever girls, and monstrous mommies,” of whom I did not realize I was included in until reading. McGregor takes Jurassic Park and with affection, intelligence, and most importantly show(person)ship, explains its ability to model feminist futures. Clever Girl is a short read that, at the least, will make you watch Jurassic Park again, and at the most, turn Spielberg’s dinosaurs into furious queer icons.

McGregor begins by contextualizing Jurassic Park as a movie and not just a franchise. It’s a movie that achieved unprecedented success at the box office, modeled spectacle both thematically and with its cutting-edge special effects, and DID YOU KNOW ALL THE DINOSAURS WERE GIRLS??? McGregor explains that Michael Chrictons original novel came with a complex explanation about lysine, dichogamy, and migration pattern, but, as she says, “The movie keeps things pretty straightforward: The dinosaurs were engineered to all be female in order to control their reproduction.”  It turns out the way life was finding was a group of dinosaurs reproducing in the absence of males.

This is McGregor’s big reveal moment: Jurassic Park is a film about reproductive justice. And, by making the dinosaurs female, it is also a film that feminizes all aspects of power and monstrosity the dinosaurs carry. This isn’t to say that the movie, or 1993 Spielberg, has amazing politics. She points out the aggressive emphasis on the heteronormative family, the total lack of women at its center, and that it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test “unless you count the velociraptors clicking to each other about eating Lex and Tim.” But Jurassic Park’s lack of women as audience is probably what makes Hannah McGregor’s exploration of its queer erotics so joyful to read. Whether it’s her emphasis on Ian Malcolm’s massive stature as a sex symbol, the hinging of her argument on that moment when Dr. Grant ties two female ends of a seatbelt together, or her reading of the dinosaurs as punishing all men who refuse to make kin (except Sameul L. Jackson who dies for literally no reason), we get to watch her take what she needs and leave the rest from Jurassic Park.

One of my favorite things about the book is watching McGregor make a reparative reading without attempting to repair. As she bastardizes Jurassic Park with theories of the monstrous feminine, the “FEMME SHARK MANIFESTO,” and “If the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park Were Your Girlfriend,” it’s like getting to watch her, academically, tear through patriarchal 1000-volt electric fences.  When I went back and watched the movie afterwards, I found myself identifying deeply with the velociraptor in the opening scene. And I realized I agreed, as McGregor writes, that “I, too, have felt caged and furious,” not just in the sexism of everyday life, but caged in the ways I have been told to watch and interpret these movies that make up our collective consciousness.

I think what McGregor does well is give us a roadmap through the culture that makes up everyday life. When I was in college, I once wrote an essay explaining why Euripides was secretly a transbian (which is still on my blog), but nobody I knew cared enough about trans-sapphic prose AND Greek drama to know what I was talking about. Clever Girl is a book that is going to introduce the “monstrous feminine” and be sexy and fun while doing it. If the book suffers from anything it is of being too digestible, lending itself only as an appetizer to the type of wonderful auto-academic work that McGregor is doing. It’s a book absolutely worth reading if you can find it, one that will leave you as hungry for more as a t-Rex after a blood-sucking lawyer.