Lester C. Olson

Education

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biography

Lester C. Olson holds a secondary appointment in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. He is an Affiliate of the Cultural Studies Program and the Global Studies Program. He specializes in visual rhetoric, human rights rhetoric, and public address & argument. He joined the Collaboratory Against Hate when it was founded in spring 2021 because its work synthesizes many dimensions of his life’s work. As a gay Professor, Olson has moved through and around hatred for most of his life. He was not surprised but rather curious when he learned that the life expectancy for gay men is 8 to 12 years shorter than heterosexual male counterparts to judge from studies in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Factors include homicide rates, suicide rates, premature deaths from drug and alcohol abuse, HIV-AIDS, living alone, and, especially, extremely high levels of cortisol triggered from coping with stress, precarious living circumstances, and overt hostility. He began his intellectual labor learning about human rights frameworks more than thirty years ago during the depths of the AIDS pandemic, when, as an untenured Assistant Professor, he was asked by the Affirmative Action office of a major research University to support white women who were dealing with misogyny in the form of heterosexual, sexual harassment. In 1993, he began teaching a course on communication and human rights, which focused on the human rights ramifications of language, symbols, and specific communication practices, such as blaming the victim and constructing rhetorical devils. These two communication practices have more in common than one might initially suppose in that both communication practices deflect from the systemic, the institutional, and the cultural. He found that human rights frameworks offer aspirational ideals for political and academic activism across social differences, or intergroup relations. “Rights” are one good example of why attention to communication matters, not only in Communication, but to any disciplines, fields, or organizations that use language and symbols to intervene against extreme hatred. “Rights” frameworks have been changing over the decades such that the term no longer necessarily signals a political commitment to liberal individualism, especially since critical race theorists redefined rights as residing between or among people rather than within each person. Whether legal interventions should focus on “hate crimes” or “biases offenses” is another fine example, because the former focuses narrowly on animus and existing laws, while the latter encompasses animus plus calculating opportunism and showing off for peers in targeting members of stigmatized groups in broader conversations throughout society. The United Nations does not consider the systematic killing and abuse of LGBTQ people in Chechnya a “genocide,” even though the scale of these crimes against humanity would be a “genocide” were they committed against a racialized minority or religious group.

Olson’s current research focuses on Audre Lorde, an internationally acclaimed poet and activist. Olson’s essays concerning black lesbian feminist Lorde’s public advocacy can be found in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1997, 1998 and 2011), Philosophy & Rhetoric (2000), American Voices (2005), Queering Public Address (2007), The Responsibilities of Rhetoric (2010), The Literary Encyclopedia (2011), Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (2012), and Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (2015). His award-winning books include Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era (1991), Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community (2004), and, with co-editors Cara A. Finnegan and Diane S. Hope, Visual Rhetoric (2007). He is a co-editor with Arabella Lyon of Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing (2012). In working for social justice, critical legal theorist and woman of color Mari Matsuda proposed a practice that she called “ask the other question.” In 1991, she advised, “When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are the class interests in this?’” In agreement, Olson distrusts single-issue identity politics, which often reproduces unexamined biases across other social differences. A Chancellor’s Distinguished Teacher, Olson offers undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on Human Rights Rhetoric and Visual Rhetoric, as well as Communication & Social Differences.

Videos

Books

Selected Essays

"Public Interactions with Norman Rockwell's ‘Four Freedoms,' Then and Now," in Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms, edited by Stephanie Haboush Plunkett and James Kimble (New York: Abbeville Press, 2018), 180-197 and 212-216.
"Sisterhood as Performance in Audre Lorde's Public Advocacy," in Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies, eds Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 109-121.
"Health Care for Modern Families: Practical Suggestions Concerning Care for Families of Gay Men and Lesbians," Health, Culture and Society 8.1 (2015): 81-103.
"Public Memory of Christopher Isherwood's Novel, A Single Man: Communication Ethics, Social Differences, and Alterity in Media Portrayals of Homosexuality," in Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Other, eds. Ronald Arnett and Pat Arneson, (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2014), 183-212.
"Intersecting Audiences: Public Commentary Concerning Audre Lorde's Speech, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,'" in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, eds. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 125-146.
"Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association," Quarterly Journal of Speech 97.3 (August 2011): 283-308.
“Rhetorical Criticism and Theory: Rhetorical Questions, Theoretical Fundamentalism, and the Dissolution of Judgment,” in James W. Chesebro, editor, A Century of Transformation: Studies in Honor of the 100th Anniversary of the Eastern Communication Association (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 37-71.
"Pictorial Representations of British America Resisting Rape: Rhetorical Re-circulation of a Print Series Portraying the Boston Port Bill of 1774," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12.1 (2009): 1-36.
"Audre Lorde's Embodied Invention," in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2009), 80-95.
“Intellectual and Conceptual Resources for Visual Rhetoric: A Re-examination of Scholarship Since 1950," The Review of Communication, 7.1 (January 2007):1-19. Reprinted in Sizing Up Rhetoric, eds. David Zarefsky and Elizabeth Benacka (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2008), 118-137.
“Traumatic Styles in Public Address: Audre Lorde’s Discourse as Exemplar,” Queer-ing Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris, III (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 249-282.259-285.
“On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83.1 (February 1997): 49-70. Reprinted in Readings in Political Communication, in press, edited by Theodore F. Sheckels, Janette Kenner Muir, Terry Robertson, and Lisa Gring-Pemble (State College, PA: Strata, 2007), 470-489.
“Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception." In J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It! ’ Poster (with James J. Kimble as co-author), Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 9(4), 533-570. Winter 2006.
“Audre Geraldine Lorde (1934-1992), Professor of English, Poet, Black Lesbian, and Socialist," American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators, ed. Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leeman (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005), 285-292.259-285.
“A Cartography of Silence: Bias Crimes and Public Speechlessness,” Journal of Intergroup Relations, 31(4), 76-102. Winter 2004/2005.
“The Personal, the Political, and Others: Audre Lorde Denouncing ‘The Second Sex Conference,’” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 33.3 (Fall 2000): 259-285.
“Liabilities of Language: Audre Lorde Reclaiming Difference,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84.4 (November 1998): 448-470.

Presentations

January 1, 2012 (All day): "Risks and Limitations of a Rhetorical Orientation to Human Rights" (with co-author Arabella Lyons). Seattle: Modern Language Association
January 1, 2012 (All day): National Communication Association for Teaching Tips on Teaching Rhetorical Criticism
January 1, 2015 (All day): "Audre Lorde's Transnational Sisterhood and the Black German Experience." Vancouver, British Columbia: Modern Language Association
December 10, 2015 - 5:00pm: Human Rights as Political Tools: An Interdisciplinary Conversation
April 26, 2016 - 12:00pm: "Rhetorical Re-circulation of ‘The Deplorable State of America, or Sc—h Government': Migration of a Political Print Series During the Stamp Act Controversy in 1765-66." Hong Kong: American Studies Conference
October 1, 2017 (All day): "Hillary Clinton, Democratic Formalism, and Colliding Human Rights." Dayton, OH, the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference
November 1, 2017 (All day): "Archiving History, Archiving Identity: Visual Culture and the Rhetorical Construction of History, Politics, and Subjects." Dallas, TX: National Communication Association
May 1, 2018 (All day): "The Rhetoric Society of America Fellows Remember: 50 Years in Retrospect." Minneapolis, Rhetoric Society of American Conference
May 1, 2018 (All day): Rhetoric Society of America Oral History Narrative, Minneapolis, MN

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