This paper looks at the histories of Kurdish communities in Nashville as a site of exploration into how refugee communities understand identities at the crux of gender, Islam, and diasporic community formations. This paper argues that U.S. Empire articulates itself at many points but especially, in this historical moment, at the crux of gender, race, religion, and sexuality (Nguyen 2011; Puar 2007; Reddy 2011). Sexist and homophobia are mapped onto Middle Eastern bodies as part of a racialization meant to contain communities of color. However, during my ethnography of Nashville’s Kurdish America, Muslim Kurdish American women challenged Arab, Turkish, and U.S. imperialisms through their performances of piety, culture, and racialized identity. Kurdish Americans are located in an interesting and precarious situation where their support for U.S. imperialism in the hopes of overthrowing Arabs and getting back Kurdistan exists alongside experiences of racial profiling post-9/11 U.S. (Rana 2011). How Kurdish American female activists manage this precarity is through a creation of dichotomous relationship between “culture” and “religion” (Islam). In this instance, both, although they situated them as polar opposites, serve to provide a discursive space where they find ways to contest Arabized Islam while dismantling Orientalist perceptions in the U.S. of Middle Eastern Muslim women. “Culture” and “religion” then consist of a particular toolkit of resistance that interjects different understandings of Islam, Middle Eastern cultures, and Muslim women in U.S. public spaces. As the young Kurdish American female activists are also head-covering Muslims who emphasize piety (Mahmood 2005), this Islamic piety, at both the convergence and dissonance of culture and religion, is the very means to invert the dominant racializations of them within U.S. society and challenge Empire’s reach internal and external to national boundaries.