Clever Girl: Jurassic Park

The 1993 Steven Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park might seem like an unlikely candidate for a queer, feminist, and anticolonial reading. However, as argued in Clever Girl: Jurassic Park, the movie offers some surprising lessons in surviving man-made disasters and the world-ending violence of tech billionaires. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park can be read as monstrous women, engineered by men to be controllable and commodifiable, who ultimately break free from the profit-driven theme park built to be their prison. During this evening, Hannah McGregor invites you to consider the radical readings that lay dormant in familiar pop culture texts and the unlikely ephemera that might make up an apocalypse survival kit. What happens if the dinosaurs break free?

Hannah McGregor is Associate Professor and Director of Publishing at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Their research focuses on the intersections of publishing and social change, with a focus on scholarly podcasting. McGregor co-hosts Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist; they are also the co-director of the Amplify Podcast Network.