We are interested in popular culture, including visual rhetoric and image-based narratives of the veiling/anti-veiling conflict between secularists and Islamists in modern Turkey, and how they influence the formulation of autobiographies of Turkish women intellectuals. Specifically, our paper will concentrate on the visual rhetoric of Professor Türkan Saylan’s iconography to examine how visual images communicate and summarize contentious positions, and how through her presentation of self and her own self-narrative Saylan struggled and negotiated with contentious imagery and discourse. One of the most vocal and visible opponents of women’s head coverings in Turkey was Professor Türkan Saylan (1935-2009). As a medical doctor she fought against the disease and the stigma of leprosy. As a secular intellectual, educator and feminist activist she fought against the systems of oppression developing under Islamist political arrangements permeating from political structures to everyday life in Turkey. She established the secularist Association for the Support of Contemporary Living to provide educational grants for poor children, especially girls, and to serve as a public forum, and a vocal opposition to the “turban,” a form of head cover that has been adopted by Islamists in Turkey. Among the main centers of contention over the meaning of headcoverings in Turkey is the Turkish Higher Education Commission (YÖK), created in the 1980s. Türkan Saylan was appointed to the Commission, and expressed pointed opposition to headcoverings in universities. YÖK itself became a battleground for the question of headcoverings in universities. YÖK banned headcoverings in 1982, then lifted the ban in 1984, only to reinstate it in 1987, lift it in 1988 and reinstate it in 1989. In 1990, the National Assembly passed a law allowing headcoverings in public spaces, then repealed it in 1997. Just as the “turban” has become the symbol of the AKP and its Islamist supporters, the iconic image of Saylan, has become a metaphor of the conflict between secularists and Islamists in Turkey. Focusing on the image and writings of Türkan Saylan as a feminist intellectual and vocal and active opponent of the headscarf in Turkey, we examine how the secularist-Islamist confrontation over head coverings has become a symbol in defining feminist intellectuals’ place in political debate and influenced her own self narrative.