Poon, Justine2025-10-272025-10-271535-685Xhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/733793242Asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat to seek protection have been the catalyst for significant legal reform and the proliferation of political discourses. The paper analyses the metaphor of the boat as being a common trope in the legislative category of the “unauthorized maritime arrival” and in the government images that advertised this legal change. The figure of the boat effaces the asylum-seeker's body from the frame of law and discourse and constructs a myth about sovereignty and borders that enables coercive control over asylum seeker bodies.application/pdfen-AU© 2017 The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University201810.1080/1535685X.2017.13469602023-10-29