In the late 19th-early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire under the influence of pressures for political modernization applied several policies to centralize its rule and exercise direct power over the Kurdish territories. Nevertheless, the loss of autonomy on the part of the Kurdish intellectuals and leaders was experienced as a challenge to their authority. In return, they struggled with these policies by exteriorizing the state and the discourses that the state represented. Kurdish nationalists tried to create their own domain of sovereignty by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains, “inner/spiritual” and “outer/material”. They imagined a Kurdish constituency untouched by the material domain and composed of language, history, folklore, legends-stories and folk songs. Kurdish intellectuals established their hegemony within this inner realm by attempting to standardize the Kurdish language, to revive traditional literature, to establish organizations and to publish journals. Moreover, the mother tongue became an essential instrument to distinguish the Kurdish nation from the other Muslim constituents of the Ottoman Empire as well as to create an imagined community among Kurdish people. The contextual rhetoric of the building and emergence of the Kurdish nation subsumed the location and identity politics of the “woman”. In this respect, Kurdish women were accepted as the pure and historical symbols/conveyors of Kurdishness since it was their language and culture that was thought to be the purest and most Kurdish. This suggests that despite their symbolic female role as mothers of the nation, women are subordinated in actual political processes. Thus, “ideal Kurdish women” who were portrayed as “desexualized political bodies” have been cultural constructs which are continually being revised, rewritten and re-appropriated. This paper analyzes the convergence and divergence of gender and national discourses in the Ottoman Kurdistan by scrutinizing the ways in which representations of masculinity and femininity were articulated within the framework of Kurdish nationalist discourse and by exploring political setting, historical exigency or ideological imperative which helped the discourse of nationalism to become the overarching umbrella that embodied other and different political temporalities. In doing so, the paper aims to understand how it was possible for the Kurdish nationalist elite to achieve the "imagined" patriarchal constructions of "female body" as passive signifiers of national cultures by metaphorically equating inviolable woman and inviolable motherland. The paper also focuses on the way in which concepts like "womanhood", "motherhood" and "gender" (trans)formed the meanings of "national/tribal/personal honor" and "nation".