Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses promiscuous pedagogy as an embodied approach to learning that invites students to bring their whole-messy selves into conversation with their academic work. It presents several classroom strategies, illustrating this mode of transformative teaching about sexuality, religion, and power and encouraging instructors to stay attuned to different ways of knowing and different kinds of knowledge. The book describes classroom activities that help students deconstruct and reevaluate common US cultural and colonial assumptions that equate veiling in Islam with the oppression of Muslim women. It provides an example of how to teach comparative religious studies courses in a way that does not present US Protestant Christianity as the normative standard or as the beginning point for understanding diverse religious systems and practices. The book explores the intersection of teaching about Islam, sexuality, and gender, this time from an instructor who is Islamic.