Women in Hezbollah occupy a paradoxical position: formally excluded from the movement's key decision-making structures, yet central to its social, religious, and mobilizational infrastructure. The presentation draws on 59 in-depth interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2022 and 2023. Researching an organization that is simultaneously a political party, social movement, and armed actor raises distinct methodological and ethical challenges: negotiating access and trust in a securitized and highly gatekept environment, managing researcher positionality as an outsider studying women inside a movement often reduced in Western scholarship to its military dimension, and safeguarding both participant and researcher safety in a volatile regional context. Methodologically, this project combines ethnographic interviewing with computational text analysis. Interviews were recorded and transcribed without paraphrasing or editorial smoothing, preserving interviewees' exact phrasing, hesitations, and rhetorical strategies. NLP methods were then applied to this corpus to systematically identify patterns in self-representation, framing of religious and political duty, and discursive negotiation of gendered exclusion - patterns that might otherwise be flattened through conventional qualitative coding or paraphrase. This presentation reflects on the tensions and payoffs of pairing ethnography with computational methods when researching politically sensitive and securitized organizations, and concludes with thoughts on what this hybrid approach offers feminist scholars working on gender within non-state armed and political movements more broadly.
