Democratic Transactions in the Life Sciences

This article presents an artistic and political experiment as an effort to advance democratic transactions in the life sciences. Artists built a ‘gender democratic 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 the creation of human embryos for medical-scientific research (a subject kept open in the Dutch Embryo Law of September 2002 to decide within a few years). By taking a gender perspective on the process of democratizing science, we aimed to create a space in which alterity and difference are constitutive elements in the public exchanges on science and technology. The idea to build a labyrinth was theoretically based on the notion of agonistic democracy - in which pluralism is the result of contestations and divisions - and on a notion of science and technology as being contextualized and socialized.