The Scarlet Letter | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Kate Seear

Dr Kate Seear takes us on a deep dive into the unexpected ways law shapes our understanding of addiction, gender, and power. We break down how legal systems reinforce outdated ideas, why addiction laws often miss the mark, and how sport is its own battleground for equality. We also explore her role as co-host of The Outer Sanctum, a ground-breaking podcast that’s shifting the conversation in Australian football. As of 2025, Dr Seear is a Professor and Australian Council Future Research Fellow based at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

Find out more about the Feminist Legal Studies Group

Transcript |The Scarlet Letter | Season 1 |Episode 7 | Kate Seear

Azadeh Dastyari: [00:00:00] Good morning! We are Azadeh Dastyari and Ronli Sifris. And welcome to the sixth episode of The Scarlet Letter, the podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today we'll be interviewing

Ronli Sifris: Dr. Kate Seear, a senior lecturer in the Monash Law Faculty and also the Academic Director of the Springvale Legal Service and a member of the Feminist Legal Studies Group.

Azadeh Dastyari: Kate's research is socio legal and empirical in nature and typically explores connections between law, health, gender, and the body. She's also the holder of an ARC DECRA fellowship focusing on addiction in the Australian legal system. Welcome, Kate.

Kate Seear: Thanks, Azadeh. Thanks, Ronli. It's really good to be here.

Ronli Sifris: It's great to have you. Perhaps we can start by asking you what [00:01:00] feminism means to you.

Kate Seear: It's a good question. I've heard some of the answers that other people gave to in this podcast. And I guess it's a similar thing in a sense to me, feminism is, a very simple word and a very simple proposition that really just means that you have a commitment to the equality of women and in all of its forms.

And that includes things like equal pay for equal women, but also eradicating violence against women or gendered violence that tends to be disproportionately gendered. And so in that sense It's, for me, it's a very simple as I said, it's a really simple proposition to say that you're a feminist because it just means that you believe in people being equal.

Ronli Sifris: And was there a point then when you began to identify yourself as a feminist, or is it something that you've just always felt?

Kate Seear: Yes and no. I think, when I was younger I I guess when I went to university, which does feel like a very long time ago I studied arts and law. In my arts degree, I guess that was the first point [00:02:00] in time at which I started to be awakened to feminist ideas and feminist literature.

I remember I studied sociology and read a lot of read a lot of stuff written by famous feminist writers for across the decades. People like Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler and Many others, and a lot of it really resonated with me very quickly. And I wasn't really sure why that was, other than, and I did get to a point, I think, when I was probably 20 or 21, where I really started to think why it was that literature seemed to mean something to me and what it meant for me.

And I guess like many, women and men for that matter. I had known people who had experienced disadvantage because they were women. Growing up, I had friends who unfortunately had been sexually assaulted and that sort of thing. And so in a way, and friends who had been stalked. And so in a way that, that kind of literature really resonated with me because I had [00:03:00] known people who had those kinds of experiences.

And Yeah, I remember actually reading the female eunuch when I was again, 20 or 21. And just feeling at that point, that was a long time after I had, really started to read a lot of feminist writing, but I remember feeling a kind of light bulb moment where I felt that, yes I strongly identify with being a feminist.

I feel really inspired and enriched by all of this amazing literature from other women. And Yeah, and it's just something that's stuck with me actually and really grown over time.

Ronli Sifris: So you seem to have read a lot of the feminist theory. Is there a particular sort of brand of feminist theory that you identify with?

Kate Seear: Yeah, I think there's probably more than one, but the one that resonates most with me, or the person who I think inspired me most in my thinking is someone I mentioned before, and that's Judith Butler. And maybe a lot of the people listening to this podcast will know who she is. She's a very famous feminist and queer philosopher.[00:04:00]

She wrote a couple of, very important feminist books back in the early 1990s when I was just a kid. She wrote a book called Gender Trouble and another one called Bodies That Matter. And her theory is generally post structuralist and She writes, her theory is a performativity theory, so she understands gender as performative and as reiterated through practices and gestures, not something that is essential or predetermined, although her ideas have have evolved a little bit over time as critiques from what are called new materialist feminists have come into play.

But I would say that Judith Butler's thinking is probably the biggest influence on me. As I said, I also studied sociology. I did my PhD in sociology. I, I did my PhD using Foucauldian theory. So Michel Foucault, who most people will also know, is probably the most influential philosopher for the last several decades, I'd say.

And so I, [00:05:00] looked at his ideas, but also in combination with feminist theory. And the other thing that I, the other sort of school of thought that influences me a lot is a school of thought generally known as Science and Technology Studies. So this includes people like Bruno Latour, Anne Marie Moll Sheila Jasanoff who's a law professor in the States.

Michael Lynch, there's a whole range of them. And a subset of that work is feminist as well. So that's a very complex theoretical framework, which I won't necessarily do justice to if I try to explain it here. But but in a sense what most of the theorists that I'm inspired by look to is the way that practices and gestures and policies work to produce ideas of gender and the gendered body and also of sex and how we might then look at policies and also for our purposes as a group, law look at the way that law instantiates a certain idea of gender.

And then if we think about ways that we can do law or [00:06:00] do policy differently, we might produce different understandings of gender and the gendered body.

Azadeh Dastyari: Wow, that's so interesting. Could you tell us a little bit about how these ideas have come about? directly influence the research that you're engaged in now?

Kate Seear: Yeah, sure.

So it might sound a little bit strange because as you mentioned at the start, as most of the work that I do looks at addiction and the law or drugs and the law. And feminist theory or feminist ideas might relate to that may seem a bit strange, but actually to me, they're natural bedfellows.

And there are a number of reasons. for that. I guess the simplest way to explain it and how feminist ideas have informed my work on drugs is that, um, there's a whole literature basically that talks about this thing that we call addiction and people that we refer to as addicts. And I use those terms always in inverted commas because they're controversial, and they're not, there's not a consensus about what those terms or what those concepts mean.

But [00:07:00] in general terms, I think a bit like, there are a number of scholars who've written about this a bit like women, people who are categorized as addicts are seen to be less valuable in our society and less valid problematic in, in some way. They're seen to be irrational unreasonable, chaotic.

All of the things actually that we often associate with femininity. Or certain kinds of femininity and then by extension with women. So there's actually a school of literature, a school of thought that there are a lot of similarities, symbolic similarities, between women and addicts and between women's bodies and the bodies of people who use drugs.

And so in a way what I do partly in my work is try and pick up some of those ideas and bring them into law to look at how the law understands people who might use drugs or people who are considered to be addicts and how the law actually reproduces ideas about drugs and drug use, people [00:08:00] considered as addicts how the law produces those people as addicts.

Judith Butler would call abject. So that is less than a subject or less than valid citizens. And how that's stigmatizing and problematic and what we might do to try and rethink those things. But then there are some other aspects of my work that try to look at around drug use more specifically as they relate to gender.

So I'm really interested in, and doing a bit of work at the moment on how the law and how lawyers understand the connections between alcohol use, drug use, or alcohol abuse. And I'm really interested in the way those connections are made out in legal settings. So part of my research at the moment looks just at this question.

I've been doing a lot of interviews with lawyers who do work in the family violence sphere and exploring how they understand or make arguments about or make claims [00:09:00] about it. the links between say addiction or alcoholism and violence. And what I've been finding in my research is that very often in legal settings, there might be say a situation where a man has been violent towards a woman and his lawyer will make the argument that he is addicted or is an alcoholic and that causes the violence and perhaps excuses it.

And And also on, the flip side is that sometimes where you might have a female victim who has been drinking or she uses drugs and that the man is still the perpetrator in that case sometimes what also happens is that lawyers like to try and make an argument that he was violent towards her because he had been frustrated by her addiction or alcoholism.

And again, in that sense, the addiction or alcoholism excuses or explains his behavior. So I'm really interested in the kind of ethics of all of that. I think it's really messy. I think it's really problematic. I'm really interested in the sort of ethics of [00:10:00] strategies that lawyers use and how they might use ideas about drugs or alcohol to try and explain away men's violence and what the effects of that are and whether perhaps we should be criticizing this area.

I think we probably should criticizing this area more strongly as as academics. Cause I think there are some parallels between that sort of practice. And the sort of practice that we saw in years gone by with, say, rape victims and the sorts of claims that were made about intoxication and so on, both in terms of the perpetrators and the victims.

There's probably many other things, but those are some of the main ways. Yeah. Yeah.

Ronli Sifris: Wow. It strikes me also that there are parallels between the work that you're doing there and Azadeh's work, because when we were interviewing Azadeh, she was talking about being focused on power differentials and the role that power plays in society.

And I think that's so much of what you've been talking about.

Kate Seear: It's funny. Someone one of the professors here in the law faculty, Jean Allain, said to me [00:11:00] recently that actually he thinks what I'm really speaking about is power. This is a kind of small, it's an important area. But it's also a sort of small example of a bigger problem or a bigger question, which is around the power dynamics, how lawyers strategize the kind of ethics of how they strategize the claims that lawyers make the power differentials between lawyers and clients, the sorts of claims lawyers might make about their clients.

The capacity of those clients to push back and on it goes. And I think he's right, actually, in a sense that he was saying to me that in the same way that lawyers might make claims about the links between drugs and family violence, in the past, and probably still now, similar claims have been made about things like race and ethnicity and violence, which is his area of interest.

And, um, the bigger question really is what I guess the bigger question is, How does the law have the capacity [00:12:00] to produce and reproduce stigma and stereotypes? And what can we do when we identify that the law reproduces these kind of stereotypical assumptions.

Azadeh Dastyari: Yeah. Wow. Speaking of power, you are also a host of a very popular podcast there, Out of Sanctum, which has Reclaimed a lot of space for women fans of football.

Can you tell us a little bit about the experience of doing a podcast like that? And how you feel about it as a feminist?

Kate Seear: Yeah so I guess the experience has been a bit of a roller coaster in a way. It's six, there's six of us, six women who produce it. So five of my girlfriends and I, and initially we just started doing it around the kitchen table of one of us with a little zoom microphone, like you've got here.

And talking about issues that we didn't feel were being addressed in mainstream media about football. Things like sexism, racism, [00:13:00] homophobia discrimination, etc. And to us, I think I could speak for all of us when I say that it was a passion project, first and foremost. We love footy, we thought it would be fun, and there were issues that we really wanted to sit down and talk about.

But it's also very much a feminist project, I think for most of us, if not all of us in the sense that what we try to do is shed light on issues that it often directly affect women. So it's been an amazing experience and it it's been a sort of confronting experience at times too, because last year we were caught up in a, what became a very big national story about disrespect towards women and also the language of violence towards women.

And that was an eye opening experience to be at the center of. What was essentially a kind of media storm, but also an incredible opportunity, I think, to lead national debate on something that we thought was really important and I guess in a bigger sense, and I don't mean this to sound arrogant and [00:14:00] I hope it doesn't sound arrogant.

One of the things that I came away from that experience with and that I take out of the podcast every week is that there's a really important place for these kind of alternative forms of media and communication like the podcast that you guys are doing here today. Where there's so many, anybody can produce a podcast now, you just need a phone and you can record on it and you need a little bit of technical know how to work out how to upload it.

And in that sense, I think there is potential for a kind of democratization of debate, particularly around issues like race and gender and sexuality. And that's very important and and I think increasingly influential. Yeah.

Azadeh Dastyari: Wonderful. Thank you.

Ronli Sifris: That has been such a fascinating conversation, Kate.

Thank you so much. That's yeah, given me a lot to take home and think about. Thank you.

Kate Seear: Thanks, Ronli. Thanks, Azadeh. And good luck with the rest of the podcast.

Azadeh Dastyari: Thank you. And thank you for listening to The Scarlet [00:15:00] Letter.