Queering the web archive: A xenofeminist approach to gender, function, language and culture in the London French Special Collection

The paper interrogates how incorporating multilingual, diasporic micro-archives (with a focus on the London French Special Collection, LFSC) can queer the predominantly anglophone UK Web Archive by disrupting entrenched binaries (public/private, national/transnational, monolingual/multilingual, gender/genre). Using a xenofeminist (XF) lens, it challenges Derrida’s notion of mal d’archive as sickness born of archival dualities, arguing instead that in-betweenness and boundary-crossings are productive. The study situates web archives historically and institutionally, highlights the risk of vast archives becoming unusable without curated special collections, and positions the LFSC as a case where diasporic presence, translanguaging, and women’s curatorial practice collectively decolonise and queer the national “patriarchive.” The purpose is to show theoretically and practically how gender, function (genre), language, and culture intersect in migrants’ web objects to transform archival universality into an inclusive, trans body.

The article engages scholarship on web archiving and digital heritage that calls for reflexive, critical approaches acknowledging archivists’ agency and the materiality/ambiguity of web archives (Ben-David; Ogden et al.; Ogden & Maemura; Milligan). It draws on debates about curating collections as data (Ames & Lewis), decolonising collections (Bonacchi & Krzyzanska; Das & Lowe), and limitations of national ccTLD-based collecting (Webster). It references gender studies and feminist theory—Haraway’s cyborg, Butler’s gender performativity, xenofeminism (Laboria Cuboniks; Hester)—to frame archives as trans bodies and to link gender/genre. It builds on translanguaging and multimodal social semiotics (Li Wei; Kress; Jewitt), diaspora/transnationalism (Appadurai; Parker & Song; Walsh), and critiques of monolingual hegemony and English-dominance online (Schroeder & Brügger; Giannakoulopoulos et al.; Mizumura). It also notes data bias and patriarchal defaults in tech (Criado Perez; Pot’Vin-Gorman). The review positions the LFSC within broader movements to represent marginalised communities via web archives and to challenge heteronormative, postcolonial structures.

The study combines conceptual analysis with an empirical, ethnosemiotic and multimodal examination of archived French migrant women’s blogs from the London French Special Collection (LFSC) within the UK Web Archive (and Internet Archive captures). Key elements: - Curatorial context: Author curated the LFSC (since 2012), assembling multilingual diasporic web objects; analysis acknowledges curator positionality and agency. - Data: Nineteen open-access women-authored blogs in the LFSC, plus related women-led community/commercial sites. Focal case studies: two blogs—Lost (and Found) in London and Londres Calling—with archived snapshots from 2010–2014, later views through 2017–2019. - Ethnosemiotic lens: Integrates ethnography (including prior on-land interviews with French migrants in London, 2011–2012) and social semiotics to read blogs as material-digital bodies situated in socio-cultural context. - Multimodal analysis: Close reading of visual design (banners, icons, image grids), navigation structures, typography and punctuation, and written language practices to trace semiotic shifts over time. - Translanguaging analysis: Examines movement beyond code-switching toward integrated, spontaneous French-English repertoires as thirdspace practice, situated in place (e.g., Tooting) and culture (e.g., Sunday roast). - Temporal comparison: Uses archived snapshots to capture design/functional changes otherwise lost on live sites (e.g., evolution from stereotypical London imagery to culturally embedded visuals; increased visual orchestration in later platforms).

- Inclusion of diasporic micro-archives queers the UK Web Archive by embedding multilingual, multimodal, cross-generic materials that counter anglophone, patriarchal, and postcolonial defaults; the archive’s dualities are productive under a xenofeminist lens rather than pathological (contra Derrida’s mal d’archive). - Women’s curatorial and authorship dominance: 19 open-access blogs in the LFSC are authored by women; many other LFSC items are women-led. This visibility contests tech’s gender bias and the ‘trailing wife’ trope; migration itself emerges as a feminist act of autonomy. - Empirical demographic context: French Consulate figures show women outnumbered men among French registrants in London in the 1990s–2000s (e.g., 1992: 20,002 women vs 9,956 men; 2002: 37,475 vs 22,610; 2003: 39,826 vs 24,216), aligning with women’s prominence in the blogosphere. - Blogs as technomaterialist XF acts: Bloggers repurpose blogs from personal diaries to commercial tools (advertising, professional promotion) and community-building platforms, queering the genre/gender boundary and embodying synthetic genders/genres. - Translanguaging evolves beyond hybridity: Early captures show contrived English insertions in predominantly French contexts with stereotypical London imagery. Over time, blogs exhibit spontaneous, intra-utterance French-English blending tied to lived London experiences (e.g., “Si j’étais ‘local’ … French Sunday roast”), reflecting thirdspace identities. - Multimodal semiotic shifts: Banners transition from tourist iconography to culturally nuanced, locally embedded elements (e.g., Oyster card, Chubb key), and later to graphic-novel styles shared across the London-French blogosphere, reinforcing praxial community-building and transnational aesthetics. - Platform affordances reshape expression: By 2018–2019, sites show image-grid galleries and auto-rotating visuals, reducing overt textual translanguaging but increasing user visual navigation—read as further technomaterialist repurposing. - Policy/technical borders matter: ccTLD constraints and UK Legal Deposit access limits can exclude transnational materials (e.g., migration of a blog URL to .fr jeopardises inclusion without curatorial intervention), underscoring the need for selective, permission-based curation to maintain inclusivity.

Findings demonstrate that diasporic collections deploy XF principles to transform archival dualities into strengths: integrating other languages and genres within a national repository reworks the universal into an inclusive trans body. Women’s curatorial and authorship practices materially challenge patriarchal and postcolonial norms of memory institutions, foregrounding minority migrant voices and everyday life. The longitudinal, multimodal and translanguaging analyses show how online migrant self-representations transition from premigration stereotypes toward embedded, emplaced, and linguistically fluid identities, queering language, culture, and function. This addresses the research aim by evidencing how micro-archives operationalise queering at multiple levels—gender/genre, spatiotemporality, language/culture—thereby mitigating the supposed mal d’archive. The work has implications for LIS (designing inclusive special collections and access policies), gender studies (technomaterialist feminist practices online), and modern languages (valuing translanguaging in post-canonical contexts).

The paper shows that multilingual, diasporic micro-archives—exemplified by the LFSC and its women-authored blogs—constitute an XF antidote to Derrida’s mal d’archive: they queer and decolonise the archive by embracing in-betweenness across gender/genre, function, language, culture, space, and time. Blogs’ technomaterialist repurposing and increasingly spontaneous translanguaging evidence trans bodies of practice that collectively rework archival universality into a diversified unity. In a climate of rising xenophobia, such xenofeminist interventions are urgent and legitimate. Future directions include extending this paradigm to other communities and repositories, refining access frameworks to overcome legal-deposit constraints, and further longitudinal, multimodal studies of translanguaging and platform-driven semiotic change in archived web materials.

- Positionality and privilege: The argument is advanced by a white European scholar/ally; the London-French bloggers studied are largely privileged migrants and not representative of trans communities, acknowledged as a performative contradiction. - Scope: Focus on French women’s blogs may appear to reassert gender binaries; the paper uses ‘trans’ metaphorically rather than studying literal trans bodies. - Access and selection biases: UK Legal Deposit regulations limit public access; ccTLD and hosting policies can exclude diasporic sites without curatorial intervention. Platform changes and URL migrations (e.g., to .fr) can remove items from scope. - Data constraints: Interview data are not publicly available; analysis relies on archived snapshots, which are instances among multiple versions and may miss unarchived changes.