A Queer Feminist Storytelling of Jurassic Park

“Right here’s a element of Jurassic Park you could have forgotten,” writes Hannah McGregor in Intelligent Woman, “the entire dinosaurs are engineered to be feminine to forestall them from reproducing.”

I had certainly forgotten this reality about Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1993 movie. As a baby rising up within the Seventies, my information of dinosaurs got here from repeated readings of Nationwide Geographic’s Dinosaurs challenge. In that slim illustrated textual content, TRex, “King of the Tyrant reptiles”, eats Triceratops in a bloody battle. In distinction to the scaly feminine protagonists of Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs’ muscular our bodies, dagger-like enamel, and insatiable lust for meat denoted their masculinity.

In Intelligent Woman, 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, wherein she mentioned how Jurassic Park deeply knowledgeable her concepts about feminism, sparked the concept for Intelligent Woman. McGregor’s podcasting expertise—particularly, her skill to speak advanced concepts in accessible methods—comes by in her witty prose.

Intelligent Woman is the 14th e-book in ECW’s Pop Classics collection. Like Bloomsbury’s Object Classes, these pocket-sized books invite authors to reframe, re-contextualize, and rethink the acquainted. This slim neon-green monograph–full with dinosaur scale endpapers—delivers a feminist tackle the pop phenomenon Jurassic Park.

The primary movie within the journey sci-fi franchise, Jurassic Park, was a technological and cinematic breakthrough. It broke a number of information, earned the creators a 1994 Academy Award for Greatest Visible Results, and was the primary film to surpass $500 million worldwide. Whereas its computer-generated particular results and the movie’s place in cinematic historical past are indeniable, its scientific contributions are questionable.

The liberties the screenwriters took, argues McGregor, proceed to form fashionable understandings of dinosaurs. She factors out that “as any true dinosaur nerd will inform you, Jurassic Park’s intelligent ladies usually are not even velociraptors; they’re really deinonychus (from the Greek for ‘horrible claw’) and had been intentionally misnamed by Michael Crichton, the unique novel’s writer, as a result of ‘velociraptor is extra enjoyable to say and most Individuals don’t have a working information of Greek.” McGregor units the report straight on technicalities like this one.

Amidst insights about Jurassic Park, McGregor tells her story of rising up. She is 9 when she first sees Jurassic Park, and the movie stays together with her, offering a backdrop for her coming-of-age. McGregor remembers, “My mom would get sick, after which die, thrusting me right into a world with out security or assurances. I might come to appreciate I used to be queer, after which that I used to be asexual, upending any neat concepts I had in regards to the contours {that a} life might need.” McGregor involves determine with fairly than worry dinosaurs as she tethers the heart-wrenching lack of her mom to the illusions of rationality and management proffered by Jurassic Park. Greater than a survival film, McGregor argues that the movie “is a feminist apocalypse that asserts matriarchal, care-based values within the face of a disaster of motherlessness.”  

Intelligent Woman is theoretically sharp and well-written. McGregor seamlessly weaves feminist thinkers like Barbara Creed, Laura Mulvey, and Jess Zimmerman into her evaluation and recollections. Refreshingly, Hannah McGregor veers away from pat ideological criticism, and Intelligent Woman isn’t encumbered by tutorial jargon. She’s a beneficiant author who assumes that the theoretical instruments employed are acquainted to readers, and if they don’t seem to be, readers are good sufficient to grasp anyway. The result’s a uncommon e-book that’s theoretically wealthy, analytically astute, and rattling good enjoyable to learn.

Intelligent Woman is a memoir, a love letter to monstrous femininities and queer kinships, and a pocket information to studying like a feminist. Writes McGregor: “I, too, have felt caged and livid. I, too, have found out the best way to make kin for myself regardless of being informed that I couldn’t. And I, too, have wished to devour the architects of a world that might not include me. Coming head to head with the elegant magnificence and terror of life itself, I’ve realized the best way to look it within the eye, unblinking.”

Readers will come away with a brand new understanding of Jurassic Park. McGregor’s Intelligent Woman embraces fairly than rejects feminine monstrosity. In so doing, the patriarchal gender binary falls aside and makes room for a narrative of interdependence and collective survival. A world wherein “girls and non-binary individuals and queers and weirdos inherit the Earth.”

“Simply go watch the film; it slaps,” advises McGregor. So, too, does Intelligent Woman. Simply go learn the e-book.

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