When I was visiting relatives in Turkey during the Çözüm Süreci (“Peace Solution”) in 2014, a friend suggested that I also visit one of the newly established “guerrilla” courts on Tendürek Mountain. Over the summer, while government and opposition officials met in Ankara to negotiate the end of the thirty-year conflict between the Turkish State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Kurds from Dogubayazit, not waiting for the guerrillas to officially “come down from the mountain” (i.e. the end of the armed struggle), traveled to the mountain to resolve disputes with relatives, neighbours, and business partners. I asked the male fighter filling my tea glass how he thought the party’s feminist ideology would change once it also “came down from the mountain” and had to confront the “lived reality” of patriarchy. “It won’t,” he answered. “Kurdish society will have to change.” When I later described his response as "naïve" to my friend, she suggested that my skepticism had prevented me from seeing the “different trajectories of possibility” of feminist resistance in Kurdistan (Cooper 2005). She pointed out that even Cynthia Enloe, who believes that, like the nation-state, anti-colonial movements establish sovereignty by re-establishing patriarchy, felt that it was “worth imagining” the impact and possibilities of national liberation movements “informed by women’s oppression” (1989). This paper adds to the scholarship on the role of Kurdish women in the liberation of Kurdistan by arguing that it is not only “worth imagining” the impact of anti-colonial resistance on Kurdish women but also on ideas of masculinity. The focus on women has limited the feminist imagination of Kurdish resistance, occluding how models of Kurdish femininity (the martyr, the guerrilla) and the roles of Kurdish women (protestor, politician, fighter) have led to re-configurations and re-inscriptions of masculinity in Kurdistan and the Turkish state. The paper begins by examining forms of artistic expression that “animate masculinity” (Amar 2011) in Kurdish resistance, using the celebration and mourning of Kurdish martyrs in Kurdish popular culture to reveal the “emergent” (Inhorn 2019) revolutionary masculinities that challenge the ethnic and gendered boundaries of the nation-state. The paper then goes onto to expose the erasure of their accompanying “insurgent” femininities, tracing the “flashing up” up Kurdish women in Turkish novels, films, and television shows. It concludes that hegemonic masculinity in Turkey is both defined and redefined in contradistinction to the “overly-liberated” Kurdish women.