“The Critic and Her Publics” series returned on Tuesday, Feb. 6, welcoming Moira Donegan, a columnist at The Guardian and writer-in-residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Donegan’s work has appeared in magazines such as n+1, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, and The New Yorker. Much of her work, including her forthcoming first book, “Gone Too Far: MeToo, Backlash, and the Future of Feminist Politics,” covers feminism, gender, politics, and the law.

For those unable to attend last semester’s impressive lineup, “The Critic and Her Publics” series highlights women in the field of criticism as they join esteemed Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism Merve Emre for a conversation on the figure of the critic, her publics, and the function of criticism in the present day.

Emre began by asking Donegan how she got from where students in the audience sat to the plush leather chair positioned behind a microphone at the front of the room. Donegan described how she went to college for creative writing, joking that employers were “banging down [her] door for employment” when she graduated. After finding herself in New York working an entry-level job at a literary magazine, unsure how to be an adult, she decided to go to graduate school for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in fiction writing.

“I finished my MFA; I wasn’t a very good fiction writer,” Donegan said. “And more importantly, I didn’t really like writing fiction.” 

Between submitting to literary magazines in New York and working other jobs, she encountered another thing: the #MeToo movement.

“When these Harvey Weinstein stories broke, and this sort of wave of first-person politicized storytelling by primarily women about sexual violence began in [the fall of] 2017, it had kind of been a long time coming,” Donegan said.   

Donegan emphasized that while the movement is often historicized as an immediate and universal cultural awakening, it had been building in the background for years.

“Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, who had been operating out of the south, had been using #MeToo as a guiding principle and a framework for her work and survivors, mostly in an urban Black community in Birmingham, Alabama, since 2006,” Donegan said. “That’s preexisting #MeToo anti-sexual violence work. In national media, there had actually been this kind of roiling, slow motion confrontation with sexual violence across the country for several years.”

Outraged and fed up with men in positions of power sexually harassing and assaulting women in the workplace, Donegan decided to anonymously create the “Shitty Media Men” list. This platform gave women the ability to anonymously report sexual violence perpetrated by men in the media industry in New York City. During the talk, she discussed her motivation for creating the list.

“I tried to imagine what it would take for sexual violence to actually be both speakable and preventable,” Donegan said. “Part of my goal was to use anonymity as a way to protect women from those perpetrators, and thus to make speaking about this more possible.”

Donegan described her relationship to the list, which incited both backlash and praise.

“As the creator, I had this very ambivalent relationship to both the document itself and also the community that formed in this flash of time when it was alive,” Donegan stated.

She created the list anonymously, but Donegan encountered a dilemma when a fact-checker at Harper’s Magazine alerted her that her identity would soon be exposed.

“I could have the story told by this hostile actor,” Donegan said. “Or I could tell it myself. But it was a story about me, and not about me. It was about me as an avatar for all these other women who used the list who were behind me, and by extension all these other women in the #MeToo movement more broadly…. So I felt that I wanted to defend both myself and this imagined community.” 

Although the list was up for only 12 hours, Donegan tends to think about her life in terms of before and after its publication. 

Emre asked Donegan how that moment changed her voice and sense of herself as a critic. Donegan began by stating that while her early work didn’t always center on feminist discourse, the public began to see her as a feminist writer after she was exposed. Due to the backlash she faced, she began to find herself writing in a defensive mode, anticipating an antagonistic reader, which was not an easy place to write from.

“What I had to do was cultivate a capacity to sort of perform invulnerability,” Donegan said. “An authorial persona that can write a little more confidently than I would feel. I had to be able to imagine a readership that was going to be willing to hear me in good faith. And that was something that I gained through experience by writing enough, and being in conversation with enough other writers, and seeing responses to my work that may have been critical, but were fair.”

Viewing the critic as both the avatar and the defender of her publics—someone who at times must perform invulnerability while being immensely vulnerable—Emre asked Donegan and the audience to turn over a piece of paper that had been placed on each of their chairs. When asked if she recognized the surprise object, Donegan stated that she did. It was Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Emre asked Donegan how she might go about analyzing a document like this. Donegan highlighted how within this document, Sotomayor uses historic and moral terms in lieu of legal jargon, which leads us to believe that her public is the American public; she is expressing sorrow for us and with us. There is a moment, however, where Sotomayor turns to addressing the court.

“She’s pointing out in this sentence that a new majority adhering to a new doctrine, school, could ‘by dint of numbers’ alone expunge [the] right [to abortion],” Donegan said. “She’s saying what we all know, which is [that] the law does not support this decision. The facts do not support this decision, the will of the people do not support this decision, and the spirit of our Constitution does not support this decision. You are not doing it because you have real legitimacy to do it. You’re doing it through the brute force of the fact that you have the votes.”

Hannah Langer ’26, who attended the talk, discussed how it felt different from the previous talks in the series.

“The talk with Moira felt more political than past events because of the political nature of Moira’s work and legacy,” Langer said. “There was a sense of respect for Moira’s work, and a solemnness because of the heavy topics of sexual assault and abortion. Also, a reverence for the power of the written word to change people’s lives, like with the Shitty Media Men list or the language present in the Roe v. Wade ruling.”

The next “The Critic and Her Publics” event is on Tuesday, Feb. 20 at 5 p.m. in the McKelvey Room in the Office of Admission and will feature Jo Livingstone, a literary critic and visiting professor at the Pratt Institute.

Nicki Klar can be reached at nklar@wesleyan.edu.