Democratic Transactions in the Life Sciences

This article presents an artistic and political experiment as an effort to advancedemocratic transactions in the life sciences. Artists built a ‘genderdemocratic labyrinth’ in Maastricht, in which scientists,women’s groups, people in general, artists, philosophers, politicians,journalists, clinical geneticists and many others interacted and negotiated on thecreation of human embryos for medical-scientific research (a subject kept open inthe Dutch Embryo Law of September 2002 to decide within a few years). By taking agender perspective on the process of democratizing science, we aimed to create aspace in which alterity and difference are constitutive elements in the publicexchanges on science and technology. The idea to build a labyrinth was theoreticallybased on the notion of agonistic democracy - in which pluralism is the result ofcontestations and divisions - and on a notion of science and technology as beingcontextualized and socialized