Lea Beka

Officiating sports for the JMU UREC Intramural Department

“The Boys” (2019-Present) is pushing the boundary of the superhero genre through a radical depiction of superhuman co-existence with non-super humans in the digital age. In the series, superheroes (also referred as supes) are obsessed with their image and notoriety as their public perception dictates their positional standings at Vought International; a pharmaceutical, entertainment, and defense corporation that licenses superheroes. As the story progresses, competing socio-cultural values between supes, non-supes, and vigilantes emerge through afrofuturistic elements that influence how the audience conceptualizes blackness in the show. In this paper, we conduct an Afrofuturistic analysis of “The Boys” to examine how hip hop and technoculture help us understand racial rhetorical logics and how they constitute blackness in the show. While “The Boys” isn’t explicitly categorized as Afrofuturistic, Afrofuturistic elements are presented throughout the series through hip hop and technoculture and further highlight racial discourses that mirror our own racial systems/discourses in contemporary culture. We will advance the idea of Afrofuturism by looking at how human and non-human entities co-exist.