In-person Event: CLEVER GIRL by Hannah McGregor with Marcelle Kosman – Chicago, IL

Women & Children First is thrilled to welcome Hannah McGregor for an event celebrating, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park. For this event, Hannah will be joined in conversation by Marcelle Kosman.

Please note: This event is free, but registration is required! By registering for this event, you agree to wearing a mask throughout the event, per W&CF’s Covid-19 guidelines.

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

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The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time — an entire generation of people has never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. The movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, and now 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.

Hannah McGregor (she/they) is an academic, podcaster, and author living on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. They’re an Associate Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where their research and teaching focus on the intersection of publishing and social change. McGregor is the co-director of the Amplify Podcast Network and the creator of the podcasts: The SpokenWeb Podcast, Secret Feminist Agenda, Witch, Please, and, most recently, Material Girls. They’re the co-editor of the collection Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018) and the author of A Sentimental Education (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2022). Their upcoming book, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park, is 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.

Marcelle Kosman (she/her) works as an instructor in English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta on Treaty 6 territory where she lives in a little house with her family. When she isn’t teaching, she is contributing to the Witch, Please Productions media empire by co-hosting Material Girls, a scholarly podcast about popular culture, and Gender Playground, a podcast dedicated to the joys of gender-affirming care for kids.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.