This article describes the account of a "European Queens" course as an example of the intellectual growth available to both the professor and the student when an instructor uses engaged, responsive teaching to address apparently incommensurable understandings of a given topic. The author outlines how the study of premodern queens relates to current debates about misogyny and gender, and explains how they arrived at a new term of gender analysis. This term, the Social Framework for Gender Experience/Expression (SFGE), fostered a fruitful dialogue between their concerns with the political deployment of gender norms and their students' primary interest in the lived experience of gender identities. It did so by calling attention to the historically specific cultural and political frameworks of gender expectations that shape individual negotiations of gender identity. As this term was introduced to the students, it was used as a tool for engaging in more inclusive readings of the overwhelmingly cis-heteronormative-slanted primary sources. This strategy allowed the author to regain students' trust and to reinspire their interest in the course material.