“She said to me that I did not seem like a Kurdish girl. How dare she say that I do not look like Kurdish! As if we have lost our Kurdishness! However, this may not be a bad thing, because you know what they say, ‘nothing is permanent except change...’” This is one of my interlocutors speaking, a nineteen year-old young woman, as a response to the accusations by an old Kurdish woman to her and her friends for not looking like “a Kurdish girl.” She is a young Kurdish woman from Dolapdere, Istanbul – a neighborhood predominantly populated by Kurdish migrants who have been displaced from the Kurdish regions of Turkey in the 1990s. This paper brings a feminist challenge to the imagination of Dolapdere as a space of freedom, where Kurdish people find a refuge against the attacks of the Turkish state in the face of their ethnicity, by underlining the ways in which young Kurdish women experience the prevalent rhetoric of Kurdishness that permeates the space of neighborhood. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Dolapdere, I argue that the notion of Kurdishness is a dynamic concept that has been attached different meanings and feelings in different circumstances and spaces by young Kurdish women. On the one hand, their struggle in the everyday life derives from their ethnicity, against the authoritarian Turkish nation-state and racist undercurrents of Turkish society, which is pervasive in the urban public space of Istanbul. While in these moments Kurdishness emerges as a liberatory discourse that evokes the ongoing political resistance, the concept gains a hegemonic meaning when it is applied within the Kurdish community where a homogenizing imagination of Kurdishness is imposed over the body of these women. By putting the ambivalence in my respondent's narration at its focus, this paper claims that the daily lives of young Kurdish women in Istanbul’s city space is based upon their negotiations with various forms of ideologies and belongings. This essay will particularly pay attention to how young Kurdish women themselves imagine the term Kurdishness while interrogating the unifying assumptions embedded in the term Kurdishness that is implemented both by the Turkish state and Kurdish community.