The Kurdish revolution in Rojava, Northern Syria involves all-women ‘Women’s Protection Units’ (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin or YPJ), whose apparently militarized, secular-feminist representations have been a consistent subject of peculiarity in both Western media and scholarship. This research engages a methodological critique of the lack of critical agency of the subject in previous constructivist and critical theory approaches to this area. It instead applies the unique potential of the interpretive and existential anthropological tradition, to provide a deeper understanding of the agency and difference within self-representations of this woman-focused transformative project. The research undertakes a case-study analysis of the primary social media pages of the YPJ using methods from visual/virtual ethnography and interpretive discourse analysis. It examines self-representations and political discourses engaged during their coverage of the liberation of Raqqa from ISIS. It is argued that such a methodological approach uncovered previously discounted discourses of agency and securing of life beneath the objectified interpretations of the Western media gaze. These aesthetically enacted discourses intersect a politics of gaining life through social freedom, with thecontestation of dominant representations of women’s life and agency in visual politics.