Vulnerability and Agency: Trans Women in Sex Work

The Rutgers Center for Gender, Sexuality, Law and Policy, in partnership with the Transnational Legal Initiative, welcomes Macarena Sáez, Fellow in ILSP and Director, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, American University Washington College of Law, for a lunchtime lecture, “Vulnerability and Agency: Trans Women in Sex Work.”

Macarena Sáez is the Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and a Fellow in the International Legal Studies Program. She teaches in the areas of Gender and Sexuality, Family Law, Comparative Law, and International Human Rights. Her main areas of research are sexual orientation and gender identity, and gender discrimination in Latin America.

Macarena is a founding member of the Network of Latin American Scholars on Gender, Sexuality and Legal Education ALAS, an organization that provides training to law professors in Latin America on mainstreaming gender and sexuality perspectives in legal education. She is also member of Libertades Públicas, an organization that promotes civil liberties in Latin America. With this organization she was one of the lead counsels for the victims in the first case on sexual orientation before the Inter American System of Human Rights Karen Atala and daughters v. Chile.

Before coming to WCL Macarena was a faculty member at the University of Chile Law School where she taught jurisprudence and worked actively in law school’s curriculum reform. She has also taught feminist jurisprudence and human rights in different universities of Latin America and Europe. Saez has given her expert testimony on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity before the Constitutional Court of Colombia and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.