‘All These Dinosaurs are Gay, Sorry’ with Hannah McGregor

Did you know Jurassic Park is a feminist masterpiece? Probably not, unless you’ve read author and podcaster Hannah McGregor’s new book, Clever Girl. Part of ECW presses’ “pop classics” series, Clever Girl explains, in McGregor’s words, what its like, “when the monsters get to speak.” Its an exploration of how a story as ubiquitous as Jurassic Park can serve as a model for a liberatory feminist future, even despite its roots.

So, anyway, McGregor and I sat down so she could explain just what it is that makes dinosaurs so fucking cool for gay people.

I’m curious how you would explain this book to someone who hasn’t heard of it and maybe won’t understand words like “reads” or “texts” or these things.

Yeah, absolutely.

I would say that it’s so hard to say it without saying “read.” My gosh, what a challenge. Because generally, what I say is that (this is) the rereading of Jurassic Park as a queer and feminist text.

So, there are both of the words I wasn’t supposed to use. What I open with for a lot of people who, like, don’t know my work, I say, “OK, so you know how in Jurassic Park, all of the dinosaurs are engineered to be female?” And people say, “No, I forgot that detail.” And I say, “my argument is that actually, that’s the whole point of the movie.”

So, what happens when we think about Jurassic Park as a movie that isn’t just about dinosaurs, but it’s about these, like, men in science, creating and attempting to cage these female animals, and these female animals break out of their enclosures, figure out how to reproduce, and eat the men?

Yeah. It’s lovely.

When we read texts in academia, we’re doing something specific with the text that is sort of separating them from their authors. So maybe you could explain what you are doing with Jurassic Park, if that makes sense.

Absolutely. So, it is 100% my understanding that Jurassic Park begins with the role that the movie has played in my own life.

And so that, for me, is the starting point for Clever Gir l… and that the academic piece of it, in large part, emerges because I am an academic. And so, when I make sense of things, I reach for a set of conceptual tools that I have been trained how to use.

Yeah, I am also an English major. I love my little tools. Would you use the word “auto academic” to describe the book?

It’s definitely sort of in the auto-theory world, which is this feminist form of scholarly writing that brings together memoir and more theoretical writing in a way that really, the goal of auto-theory, for me, when I do it, is to demonstrate that these theoretical ideas that can feel, like, sort of weird and detached from reality, like, cool idea, but what does that have to do with me? I really like to show how they actually show up for me in my own life. Because theory, critical theory, has been one of my major tools for navigating the world.

Ok, so, If somebody was to read this text, and they weren’t normatively bodied, how would you like them to use this book to understand the gaze that’s coming at them?

I love that. So, one of the sort of sets of theories that I am working with in the book is the concept of monstrosity and the way that the category of the monstrous is something that is socially constructed and historically has been constructed as a way of exercising power over those of us who are non-normatively bodied. And a primary sort of way that the power operates is through representation.

The way that Western film assumes the default straight white male viewer, and positions anybody who isn’t a straight white man as an other, a curiosity, something to be either desired or disgusted by, or sometimes both. And so, one of the really powerful things about taking back these stories is that monstrous, rather than being like, “no, no, please see my humanity.”

It instead lets us say, like, cool, well, what happens when the monsters get to speak? The monstrous has its own subjectivity.

But it is kind of amazing. I entirely forgot that all the dinosaurs in the movie were female, and I have never been reminded of it. So, I’m kind of curious, is there this, like, collective amnesia about this aspect of Jurassic Park?

No kidding, right? I mean, part of it is that even within the movie itself, like they establish in text: all of the dinosaurs are female.

Dr. Henry Roof says that we’ve engineered them all to be female so that they can’t reproduce. But when Dr. Grant encounters the T-Rex, he refers to the T-Rex as he, exclusively. In fact, the only actual dinosaurs that are consistently gendered female by the characters when they refer to them are the velociraptors.

Because they’re murderers, and that’s how women be, murdering. And so, like, I think, you know, part of that collective forgetfulness is that it is not even consistent, like the characters don’t sort of register consistently within the movie, but makes it easier for you as the viewer to also forget.

But, you know, the other part of it is that, the dinosaurs are not female; the dinosaurs are intersex … They were spliced with frog DNA, and some pieces of frogs are intersex and can reproduce, basically can, like, change the role that they play in reproduction, depending on the environment that they’re in.

Yes. And I love the strangeness.

Yeah, the strangeness. Yes, 100%. They’re kind of, like, “female” in quotation marks.

Like, they’re not actually biologically female, which is part of what makes it, like, also a profoundly queer film. The power of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park is their ability to subvert the structures that these scientists are trying to build. And one of the structures that they are subverting is the notion of a sex gender binary.

They’re just like, nope.

After reading the book, I went back and watched Jurassic Park, because I was like, “I was missing some shit.”

So, I’m also interested about the way that, like, our interpretation of media … It’s so compounded by what we’ve been told about a certain piece of media.

100%. And that means that we can continually reimagine things Which is like why we like talking to each other about stories.

Can you explain a little bit about what is happening in the movie, like with men and caretaking and those ideas?

So, one of the really important storylines that’s happening among the human characters is that the creator of the park, John Hammond’s grandchildren, have been sort of lost in the park after the electricity has been shut off.

And they are obviously incredibly vulnerable to all of these dinosaurs that are now just free roaming the park. And the person that they are with is Dr. Alan Grant, our paleontologist hero, equipped with his sole skill, which is knowledge of dinosaurs. And he’s been established for us at the beginning of the movie as somebody who does not like kids.

He threatens a child in, like, the first 10 minutes.

He threatens a child with a velociraptor claw. He like really doesn’t like kids. But when faced with this responsibility for these children, he immediately steps into it.

So, we’ve got a hero in this movie whose heroism is established by a combination of deep scientific knowledge and the willingness to engage at a material level in the business of taking care of children. And contrast that to, like, Chris Pratt in the movie, right? Punching dinosaurs.

And I assure you, (he) does not have a single emotional interaction with the child at any point. He just, like, shoots guns near children, and the children are like, “Yay, we love the man with guns!” Sure.

in the midst of this kind of apocalyptic disaster, what matters, really the only thing that matters, is caring for one another and those who step up taking care of the other people on the island are the ones who survive. You know, one exception is the unjust killing of Ray, the Samuel L. Jackson character …  I think it’s (just) straight-up racism within the logic of the film

Right, so Dr. Grant steps into this role of nurture very quickly, like the children sleep on him, you know, like he’s carrying them, he’s physically caring for them. It’s just, like, these absurd ideas of gender categories are, like, no use to us in this, in this world. The chaos that has been unleashed by the dinosaurs

I’m curious about how we can have some different possibilities for writing about dinosaurs in the future?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, I would be so stoked for more dinosaur stories that lean into the strangeness of dinosaurs … It makes sense why in a lot of straight-up action stories, because they are a symbol of otherness, their role is to get either killed or tamed by a powerful white man. Because that’s what you do with otherness.

And so stories where we get to see that otherness instead being embraced or respected are always going to be exciting to me.

Not just like, as academics, but like, what can artists make out of it? Like, if the people who are making Jurassic World cared more?

One of the things that we are collectively faced with is trying to imagine a future for ourselves as humans on the other side of the absolute barren wasteland that is end-stage capitalism, right? The burning down of the earth, the escalating genocides, the violence and terror that is being rained down on people on a global scale.

One of the most urgent things we need to be doing imaginatively is thinking about what could come after this … I think dinosaurs have this capacity to represent the deep alien-ness of the world and the fact that our home is also a place that is completely unknowable to us.

And you use a really delightful theory in the end ties into this. Something about the relationship between dinosaurs and infrastructure.

In dinosaur movies, dinosaurs always seem particularly angered by infrastructure. Yes. Like they’re always destroying, like, they want to crush a car.

And it’s like, well, why would they want to crush a car? Like, they don’t know what a car is. A car, they would have no way of distinguishing between a car and a rock. Like, these would just be unknowable categories.

Yes. The quote is, “Clearly it’s not the buildings themselves the dinosaurs object to. It’s the spatial logic that they represent, the system by which we parcel out the topology of existence into named and comprehensible chunks”… That is crazy.

Imagining of the earth as a thing that is there for us to use is a big part of how we have gotten into so much trouble. Right? We’re not in a relationship with it. We don’t have a responsibility of care to it. It’s just something that we get to use how we want.

Dinosaurs, you know, I think about them a lot in the book as being these kinds of, like, representatives of the deep, like, the deep age of the earth. It’s like the earth’s bones come back to life to punish us for our hubris. And, like, that is also part of the lesson to be learned from dinosaurs, is that they are unimpressed with our small human senses.

Any final note just about the book or what you would like people to take away from it?

Really what I want it to function as is a kind of model of how we can make use of stories to help us navigate the world. There’s such a vital tool for me and for I know a lot of other people …You can absolutely just say, “all these dinosaurs are gay, sorry.” And we can’t stop you.

Photo courtesy of Hannah McGregor