The Syrian refugee crisis is the largest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. Since the official beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, more than 5.6 million people have fled the country as refugees, and another 6.2 million people are currently displaced within Syria. Whereas the Syrian refugee crisis has received significant academic and media attention over the past few years, limited research addresses the role of gender and sexuality in shaping responses to the displacement and resettlement of Syrian refugees. Beyond the accounts of women as victims of gender-based violence lie a complex set of factors shaping the experiences and choices Syrian refugee women make in both fleeing Syria and resettling to places such as Canada. Combining focused ethnographic interviews with media discourse analysis, this joint paper offers an intersectional analysis of how gendered violence and public discourses around Syrian refugees constructs contradictory narratives about Syrian refugee women. Drawing on interviews conducted with Syrian women who arrived in Montreal, Canada as refugees since 2015 in conjunction with a comparative discourse analysis of international news articles from Al Jazeera, BBC News, and the New York Times that deal with the Syrian crisis from a gendered lens, this paper will highlight how systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy intersect and shape the lives of refugee women. Using a mixed-methods approach and analysis by combining ethnographic work with media discourse analysis, our project offers a contrapuntal examination of how normative concepts of masculinity, femininity, sexuality, family, and subjectivity inflect accounts of refugee displacement and resettlement to offer new insights into how gender is deployed in responses to the current refugee crisis.