Reconfiguring Gendered Labor Regimes: Production and Social Reproduction in Transnational Semiconductor Manufacturing

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Abstract

How are intensive production and social reproduction linked in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and how is this linkage reconfigured through transnational industrial transplantation? This article examines TSMC’s relocation of leading-edge chipmaking from Taiwan to the United States amid geopolitically driven reindustrialization. Drawing on ethnographic research and 84 interviews with engineers and spouses, I argue intensive semiconductor production depends on a gendered labor regime assemblage linking production to infrastructures and norms of social reproduction. While fabrication processes are transplantable, this assemblage cannot be coherently reassembled cross-border. Institutional destabilization occurs as expatriate families lose Taiwan’s reproductive infrastructures, undermining a previously consented gendered bargain sustaining overwork. Normative destabilization arises among local hires: Taiwanese immigrants recruited as cultural brokers experience eroding consent as U.S. embeddedness conflicts with transplanted expectations, while non-Taiwanese engineers more openly resist these demands. These dynamics show how industrial transplantation falters when transplanted production regimes become misaligned with locally embedded reproductive arrangements.

Author

• Ya-Wen Lei, Harvard University