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Paper short abstract

This paper follows the cleanroom suit to trace a central contradiction in computing: protecting purity for chips over workers. Using historical and material-semiotic methods, I trace the racialized, gendered hierarchies built into the garment and naturalized in Silicon Valley's aesthetic practices.

Paper long abstract

Scholars of digital culture have extensively documented the environmental and labor costs of chip production (Gabrys 2011, Nakamura 2014, Crawford 2021). The specific logics governing how bodies are valued–and devalued–within fabrication sites remain underexamined. This paper argues that the cleanroom suit (garments worn in semiconductor manufacturing) materializes a foundational contradiction at the heart of computing history: an obsessive commitment to purity for the chip that systematically disregards protections for the workers who make it. Drawing on historical and material-semiotic methods, I treat the suit as an "idea-in-form”– a material object that naturalizes particular hierarchies of bodily value. This hierarchy was built into the garment itself, designed to protect the chip, not the worker. Its design selectively contained human-sourced contamination while exposing cleanroom technicians to toxic, sometimes carcinogenic chemicals. Through archival and visual analysis of semiconductor trade literature, cleanroom operation manuals, activist materials, and Silicon Valley advertising campaigns from the 1970s through the 2000s, I examine how contamination control protocols positioned human bodies as the primary threat to microchip production–to be disciplined, contained, and ultimately displaced “offshore.” Throughout Silicon Valley's history this hierarchy was consistently enacted through racialized and gendered hiring practices that explicitly sourced "small, foreign, and female" workers (Hossfeld 1993). Intel's influential 1997 "Bunny People" campaign transformed the cleanroom suit's disciplinary function into a floating signifier of technological transcendence– available to some bodies, premised on the exploitation of others. The cleanroom suit thus reveals how semiconductor infrastructures produce fantasies of disembodiment for some, systematically exposing other bodies to harm.