Osa Johnson

by 

 Laura Horak 

Laura Horak investigates the history of transgender and gender-nonconforming film and media in the United States and Canada, as well as the history of sexuality in U.S. and Scandinavian cinema. Supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Horak is researching the history of transgender, Two-Spirit, and gender-nonconforming filmmaking in Canada and the United States and creating a pilot online database to promote these filmmakers. Horak is also writing a book titled Cinema’s Oscar Wilde: Mauritz Stiller and the Production of Modern Sexuality (under contract with Rutgers UP) that investigates the ways that cinema participated in the Swedish project of modernizing sexuality via a case study of the gay, Jewish, Finnish-Swedish director Mauritz Stiller.

Osa Johnson, billed as “The Heroine of 1,000 Thrills” in the promotion for Jungle Adventures (1921) and deemed “the greatest woman explorer and big-game hunter” by Collier’s magazine, spent most of her career as “Mrs. MartinJohnson,” the female half of the famous “Martin Johnsons.” She only acquired popular recognition as “Osa Johnson” when she continued her adventures following her husband’s untimely death in 1937. Over the course of the Johnsons’twenty-seven-year career together, they collaborated on fourteen feature films, thirty-seven educational short films, seven books, and countless lecture presentations on their expeditions to the South Pacific, Africa, and Borneo.