CNN now has a 3 minute video up from their 1-hour exploration of race, gender, and politics on Friday. In it, CNN’s Randi Kaye talks with a group of women about the “unavoidable issues of race and sex over Clinton and Obama.” And speaking of spectacle, on March 31, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at my alma mater (the University of Michigan) will be offering one of theirs. The event is called “Status and Spectacle: Stagings of Gender, Race, and Class in U.S. Popular Culture” and I wish I could teleport and attend. The poster they sent me has this amazing image of the Hollywood Canteen for Service Men, white service men casually strolling in on one side, “colored” service men rigidly lined up on the other, waiting, it seems for the white boys to go in. Among the topics to be covered: southern culture, white manhood, and the 1956 assault of Nat “King” Cole; Gretchen Wilson and the country rhetoric of the “virile female”; and clashing configurations of class, race, gender, rank, and celebrity at the Hollywood Canteen.

(The event will take place from 4-6pm at the Michigan Union, for those in the area! For more info, call 734.764.9537)