Capitalizing on the virtual space, extremist organizations broadcast their activities to the rest of the world. The performative elements and the symbolic behavior of statehood are as essential as a legitimizing strategy as activities on the ground (Weber, 1998). As extremist groups have become more prominent in the digital world, scholars are researching women’s agencies within these organizations more frequently. Scholars across disciplines prolifically examined women’s roles in extremist organizations (for example, Blee, 1996; Forcucci, 2010; Latif et al., 2020; Phelan, 2020). Nonetheless, such literature does not address how the group conveys the family unit within their aspired statehood and whether the group’s ideology and territorial aspirations influence this choice. The hegemonic gender stereotypes espoused by these groups will help us further understand their self-descriptions and inner narratives. The family unit is inherent to statehood (Hanley, 1989). Thus, including women and children in rebel governance literature will provide a more comprehensive approach to understanding extremist groups’ global constituency. More specifically, my paper will ask how violent extremist organizations construct the ideal family unit and how this is associated with their ideology and territorial aspirations. Through a mixed-methodology of unsupervised machine learning and content analysis, this paper will examine the family unit’s use within the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) online magazines (Dabiq, Rumiyah, and al-Naba) between 2014-2020. Using unsupervised machine learning, topic modeling (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), and the ANTMN approach (Walter & Ophir, 2019), the paper will map the thematic structures of the corpora to illustrate the topic networks around gender and family unit. The paper tests significant associations between the variables, including gender roles, home economics, and family with the group’s ideology, time, and space (territory). The findings demonstrate how ISIS employed the family unit as an idealized concept to perform statehood to the global audience.