Hello! I’m Jon Heggestad – a second-year PhD student in the English department at Stony Brook University. I’m interested in 19th-century British and American literature, queer theory and digital humanities. However, I’m also interested in the rhetoric of the LGBTQ+ community and how this rhetoric might be passed from one generation to the next. With this in mind, I’ve organized this independent study in a way that allows a closer look at how YA literature might be regarded as a developing form of activism.