Women’s representation in fantasy digital storytelling: negotiating gender identities in participatory culture.

This thesis explores how women’s representation in fantasy storytelling is constructed, circulated, and reinterpreted within digital participatory culture. It focuses on the relationship between fantasy literature, gender identities, and online fan practices, examining how female characters and female-coded figures are shaped through narrative agency, archetypes, stereotypes, power relations, desire, and social expectations. The theoretical framework combines fantasy studies, feminist media theory, representation theory, and concepts of new media, convergence culture, fandom, and participatory culture. The research uses qualitative textual and contextual analysis of selected fantasy narratives and their broader digital reception. It investigates how fantasy storytelling negotiates gender identities and how readers and fan communities participate in interpreting, discussing, rewriting, and expanding these representations through online platforms such as social media, reading communities, and fanfiction spaces. By connecting literary analysis with digital media and fandom studies, the thesis argues that women’s representation in fantasy is not shaped only by authors and published texts. It is also influenced by reader engagement, platform-based cultural practices, and participatory forms of storytelling that create new spaces for questioning and transforming gender roles within fantasy worlds.