As the first total war experience of the century, World War I altered the social, political, and cultural orders and structures of the warring states. The high death toll on the battlefront and people’s suffering from famine, poverty, and epidemics on the home front engendered death as a part of everyday life and a transnational phenomenon that altered the meanings attached to social categories, particularly gender, age, and sexuality, according to the sociopolitical setting of the time. This paper explores the visual and literary representations of martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire during World War I through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. By using queer theory and feminist concept-analysis, I argue that dying on the battlefront, as a personal yet highly politicized experience, had two contrasting yet interlinked functions. On the one hand, from the perspective of the wartime government and its intellectual allies, the body of martyr represented the ideal masculine subjecthood that they wanted to cultivate in and through the bodies of Turkish-Muslim youth. Besides, the heroic sacrifice that martyrdom embodied led to its deployment as an ideological tool to recruit young volunteers from high schools to fight on the battlefront. On the other hand, the experience of martyrdom and its various depictions in the early twentieth-century youth magazines, novels, and postcards bore eroticized undertones. Alongside being a religious phenomenon, martyr and the experience of dying on the battlefront were defined through but also shaped the wartime politics of sexuality deployed by the Ottoman government. In other words, alongside coining the norms of ideal masculinity, through its visual and literary representations, martyrdom also functioned as a sexualized phenomenon through which the unruly, or unmanly, masculinities were defined from the patriarchal perspective at the time. Employing death and martyrdom as my concept of analysis, this paper offers a reading of death and martyrdom in the sociopolitical setting of World War I by locating it at the intersection of religious, national, and sexual discourses of the period. By using Red Crescent postcards, as well as literary and visual depictions of martyrdom in two Ottoman periodicals for children and youth, Talebe Defteri and Konya Oksuz Yurdu magazine, I contribute to the panel through a reading of visual and literary representations of martyrdom and its significant role in constructing hegemonic and alternative masculine subjectivities.