Pandas as new icons of Koreanness: Childbirth, growth and family-making at a South Korean zoo

During the pandemic, panda craze had made waves in South Korea and beyond, with the giant panda Fu Bao becoming a zoo celebrity and icon of Korean popular culture. This article examines SBS Animal Farm , a South Korean documentary featuring the growth story of Fu Bao, and the 2023 photo-essay collection Omniscient Viewpoint of Fu Bao: Photo Essay Book by Everland Zoo . I ask how the Korean media has represented birth, childcare and early education as experienced by the pandas and how such representations are intertwined with anxieties over mass migration, gender norms and economic prospects in modern-day South Korea. Through discourse analysis, I find that while media representations of foreign species and interspecies encounters in South Korea often seek to alienate the foreign ‘other’ and problematize foreign masculinity, they are not categorically the same with popular representations of migrant workers and foreign brides. Unlike migrant workers and foreign brides whose cultural citizenship remains ambiguous at the discursive level, pandas as a foreign species are represented as constitutive of rather than external to ‘Koreanness’, thus complicating and contesting South Korea’s ethnocentric and metrocentric discourses.